Irregular verb morphology in Nigerian English

Verb regularization is often characterized as a morphological Americanism in contemporary English. Using a synchronic approach, this study investigates the regular -ed vs. irregular -t alternation in preterites and past participles from British, American, and Nigerian Englishes. Although verb regularization patterns in Nigerian English are considered to be under the growing influence of American English, corpus evidence from the Global Web-based English corpus and the International Corpus of English reveals that irregular -t variants remain prevalent in the written data. To examine the conditioning factors, a dataset of 1,643 annotated observations was subjected to probabilistic modelling. The results indicate that significant predictors of verb regularization behave heterogeneously in the three varieties, and there is some evidence for probabilistic indigenization in Nigerian English. These findings suggest that the role of prescriptivism in shaping the usage patterns of Nigerian users of English as a Second Language (ESL) can hardly be overlooked.