This book explores how English accents are perceived, evaluated, and socially interpreted within contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on original empirical research involving Nigerian university students, the author investigates how speakers assign value to different English varieties, specifically American, British, Ghanaian, Jamaican, and Nigerian English, and what these evaluations reveal about identity, power, and postcolonial linguistic hierarchies. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines surveys, interviews, and an indirect verbal-guise experiment, the book uncovers both conscious beliefs and unconscious biases shaping how Nigerians respond to different English accents. At its core, the book examines the relationship between accent, social status, and cultural belonging in a multilingual, postcolonial society, offering new findings and implications for scholars, language educators, and policymakers alike.

Folajimi Oyebola holds an advanced postdoctoral research and teaching position in English Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany. His scholarly work is situated at the intersection of corpus linguistics and variationist approaches to language, with particular emphasis on morphosyntax, phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics, and discourse-oriented analyses of language use. He has published widely in leading international peer-reviewed journals.