“Mehn! This wins the award”: The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English.
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Cambridge University Press
Abstract
This study extends the
scholarship on discourse-pragmatic features of
NigE by examining an emotive interjection,
mehn, which has not received scholarly attention
in NigE studies. Mehn appears to be an adaptation
of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)
pronunciation of man as an interjection. Although
man can be used as an interjection (see Norrick,
2015: 260), a random sampling of 100 tokens of
man in the Nigerian component of the Global
Web-based English corpus (henceforth, GloWbENig)
did not yield the use of man as an interjection.
In AAVE, the <a> in man is pronounced as /æ/ but
this sounds like /e/ to the NigE user. Hence, a number
of NigE speakers appropriate the sound as /e/
and pronounce the word as /men/.
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Citation
Unuabonah, F. O. (2022). “Mehn! This wins the award”: The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English. English Today, 38(3), 143-151.