Nigeria: Top 50 Words Nigerians Commonly Mispronounce (I)

I have finally yielded to the pressures of my readers who said I should write on Nigerian (mis)pronunciations of common English words. I was initially reluctant to write this for a whole host of reasons. For one, pronunciation is not an ingredient of Standard English; only vocabulary and grammar are. In any case, different national varieties of English have different pronunciations and accents, and none is more "correct" than the other.So there is no such thing as English without an accent. All spoken English is inflected with an accent. Heck, every spoken language has an accent. That is why phonologists (people who study pronunciation and accents) like to remind us that "A person without an accent would be like a place without a climate."
Although "Received Pronunciation" (also called "Queen's English,"King's English," or "BBC English") and "General American" (which closely approximates the demotic accents of people in Midwestern America) are the most socially prestigious pronunciations in British and American English, a great majority of people who speak perfect English don't conform to any of these standards. So Standard English and "proper" pronunciation are two quite different kettles of fish. As Sydney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut noted in their Longman Guide to English Usage, "Standard English is... spoken by people with different accents."
If that is so, I thought to myself, why isolate Nigerian English pronunciation for censure? Well, I guess it's because Nigerian English isn't a native variety and there are many important respects in which it radically departs from the two dominant varieties of the language. It would benefit people who are interested in international intelligibility in the English language to be aware of some of the major differences in the way common English words are pronounced, especially in comparison with the dominant dialects of the language.
The second reason for my initial reluctance was my knowledge of the fact that Nigeria has a vastvariety of pronunciations and accents. These accents and pronunciations are influenced by geographic location, mother-tongue influences, social class, and educational levels. Many Hausa speakers of English, for instance,interchange "p" and "f" and render the "th" sound in the article "the" as "za," etc. People in southern Kaduna, Plateau State, and other communities in central Nigeria tend to interchange "v" and "b," while Igbos of southeastern Nigeria mix their "l" and "r."