Governance and Public Service Delivery in Nigeria: The Role of Information and Communication technologies CUCEN2017 417 A PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF FLIGHT ANNOUNCERS’ PRONUNCIATION PATTERN AT THE MURTALA MUHAMMED AIRPORT, LAGOS OGBULOGO Charles & UGBOKO Bereton-aye Esther Department of Languages, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria Abstract Hearing an announcement made over the loud speaker in any Nigerian airport leaves most hearers with the impression that the announcer has an excellent command of English. There are however some listeners, mostly travellers that claim that they barely hear or understand what is being announced. This is a serious challenge since air travel is a global phenomenon that requires the highest level of intelligibility. This study thus aims to investigate the pronunciation pattern in the language of flight announcers at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, in line with the Labov’s theory of Linguistic Variation. Data was elicited from ten flight announcers, through purposive sampling; using a questionnaire and reading test. Output of the reading test was recorded, phonetically transcribed and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result showed that exposure to native speakers, age of respondents and years of working experience, affects correct pronunciation. It also showed that most flight announcers approximate the English phonemes with what is obtainable in their mother tongue while some others exhibited cases of dialectically influenced personal speech handicap. Keywords - Flight announcers, intelligibility, linguistic variation, pronunciation pattern. INTRODUCTION All over the world, it is evidently clear that travellers miss their flights for various reasons (Aliyu, 2017). A study conducted by Kabbee (2014) gives six possible reasons why travellers miss their flights. This includes traffic delays (which accounts for the highest percentage), oversleeping, disorganisation, forgetfulness, approaching the wrong terminal and presentation of expired passports. In addition, Tucker (2016) says that other reasons might be tight connections between flights, timing or a lengthy security check. This seems to be contextual since the reasons are a little different in Nigeria as travellers commonly miss their flights because of lateness, inability to fully process flight announcements (Abati, 2017) and presidential movement (Daily Trust, 2015). Out of the three reasons given above, the most disheartening stems from that of flight announcements. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Covenant University Repository