Ibibio

Descriptive works on Igbo have been based mainly on the standard variety of the language. This variety has twenty-eight contrastive consonants (excluding nasalization, aspiration and labialization, which play phonemic roles in some other dialects of the language.) As a result of this circumstance, Igbo has generally been reported as a twenty-eight-consonant language, both by scholars and language policy makers. However, subsequent work on such dialects as Osuowere, Umuchu, Isukwuato and Aku has revealed about fifty to ninety-six underlying consonants. With the examination of these dialects and more, the number of Igbo consonants, both phonetic and phonemic, is undoubtedly greater than generally recognized.

The Igbo language is multi-dialected. It comprises many varieties but among all, the standard Igbo has been universally accepted by the native speakers of the language to be used in education and for wider communication throughout the Igbo speaking areas of the nation. Many varieties of the Igbo language differ in sounds and sound patterning. This paper investigates the differences in the phonological patterning of lexical words in Ogidi variant of Igbo and standard Igbo using the Comparative Method as the theoretical framework, and the descriptive approach to data analysis. This phonological patterning would sometimes involve the alternation of the standard Igbo /s/, /r/ and /w/ with /ts/, /l/ and /b/respectively in the Ogidi variant. The paper tries to find out in what words such alternation occurs. Among other things, it discovers that the standard Igbo /s/ is not found in Ogidi-Igbo, and so, the dialect substitutes it with /ts/ which is found as the closestmatch phoneme for /s/ in Ogidi. For /r/ and /l/phonemes, they are observed to be in free variation in most words, though with few exceptions in words like ọ́ rị̀à 'sickness', rị́ọ́ 'beg/plea' and ụ̀ rị́ọ́ m̄'a sign made by hand in rejection of evil'. Then, the substitution of standard Igbo /w/ with /b/ in the Ogidi-Igbo occurs most times, but not entirely, mainly in words containing the inceptive extensional suffix -we/-wa 'start/begin to'.

Studies in African Linguistics

Urhobo, a South Western Edoid language of the Niger-Congo family, is spoken in Delta State, Nigeria. In the synchronic phonology of the language, there are seven surface vowels: [i, e, E, a, J, 0, u], but the behavior of some vowels, especially e, 0, G, is sometimes at variance with their expected vowel behavior, indicating that there may be abstract underlying vowels */r, v, ;)1 which have merged with Ie, 0, EI. The result, when compared with sister languages such as Degema and Isoko, is that the Urhobo system appears quite complex. The focus of this paper is showing that abstract underlying */r, v, ;)1, which are Proto Edoid vowels, still have an effect in the synchronic phonology: thus, Ir, el become [e], lv, 01 become [0], and I;), EI become [E] and possibly [ a]. When we account for the 'awkward' behavior of apparent Ie, 0, E/, the Urhobo vowel system is clear and straightforward.

This work sets out to analyze the pitch of tone in lexemes in the Igbo language to find out the effect of consonant types occurring before vowels on the pitch of the tone of the vowels. The data are collected from two males and two females from each dialect using structured personal interview and the data recorded electronically. In the findings the pitch of the vowels following plosives are higher than those following other classes of consonants. Also the tone of the vowel does not affect the F0 of the tone. Finally the downstepped high tone does not have influence on the pitch of the vowel. We therefore conclude that the downstepped high tone in the Igbo language in line with what is found in the literature, consonant types do have effect on the pitch of tone of following vowels.

Abstract Crystal (1997: 189) defines “Ideophones” as “a term used in linguistics and phonetics for any vivid representation of an idea in sound, such as occurs through onomatopoeia”. Ideophones tend to be longer in terms of the combination of sounds than lexical classes. Thus, it enables the users to pack meaning into single morphemes thereby making the words semantically multidimensional. (Woodbury1987:715). Vowel repetition or lengthening is also a characteristic of ideophones. Ideophones are often phonologically anomalous in terms of sounds and sound sequences, tonal structure and phonological behaviour. (Welmer1973:27). In any case, these features have an income relation between sound and meaning. Just like any natural language, ideophones represent a robust word category in African language. To this end, this work is designed to arrive at an applicable analysis and classification of Edo and Yoruba ideophones using a contrastive approach inspired by the idea of canonical typology. The theory of Autosegmental morphology as propounded by Welmer (1981), Marrantz (1982) and Anderson (1992) is employed in this study. This theory proposes that reduplication is essential affixation, but what is affixed is a prosodic template, that is, a syllable foot or even a phonological word is the affixation of a consonant- vowel (CV) skeleton which is itself a morpheme to a stem. The phonemic content of the reduplicative affix is then derived by copying the complete phonemic melody of the root and linking it to the affixer CV template respecting the principles of association familiar from auto segmental phonology. The researcher looks at the features of the selected ideophones and tries to see if there are syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features of these groups of words in Edo and Yoruba ideophones. Data for this study have been gathered from the interview conducted for the thirty subjects (fifteen from each group) from Ibadan, Oyo state and Akoko Edo, Edo State of Nigeria. In addition to this, samples of ideophones from the previous studies in these two languages Awoyale 1983; Maduka; 1982 were drawn and used as supplement to the raw data collected. It is clear from the results, the researcher is able to establish the fact that there is an avalanche of ideophones in the two selected languages and that they have certain category which can be differentiated by specific sets of parameters such as phonetic, phonological, morphological and semantic all of which can be used to determine its status as a linguistic entity.

Oceanic Linguistics, 1999

rci.rutgers.edu

This paper, a contrastive study of the phonology of Igbo and Yoruba, is aimed at finding out the phonological problems the Igbo learners of Yoruba and the Yoruba learners of Igbo will encounter in their learning Yoruba and Igbo, respectively, as their L2. Using existing works on the phonology of Igbo and Yoruba, the researchers compared the consonants, vowels and tonal systems of both languages. Igbo is made up of twenty-eight consonants and eight oral vowels, while Yoruba has eighteen consonants, and twelve vowels comprising seven oral vowels and five nasal vowels. The contrastive analysis carried out evinced that there are some sounds in Igbo which are not present in Yoruba; also some sounds in Yoruba are not in Igbo. For example, /p kw gw v z ŋ ŋw ɲ ɣ ʧ / are Igbo phonemes which Yoruba lacks. Another striking difference between the two languages is the presence of nasal vowels in Yoruba, / ĩ ɛ ̃ ã ɔ ̃ ũ /, which do not exist in Igbo. Also, /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ are in Igbo and not in Yorub...

UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2015

Gerald Okechukwu Nweya Department of Linguistics and African Languages University of Ibadan, Nigeria Abstract This is a study of the vowels of Imilike dialect, a variety of Northern Igbo dialect. Its specific objectives include identifying the vowels of the dialect, determine their phonemic status, distributional pattern and phonotactic constraints and as well compare them with those displayed by the standard Igbo. Data for the study were collected using unstructured interview and observation. Data were analysed in the framework of generative phonology. Minimal pair test was conducted to identify the vowels of the dialect. The study reveals that the dialect displays eleven vowels including the open mid front unrounded vowel /ε/ and the central vowels, [ə] and [ə̣]. All except the central vowels are phonemic in the dialect. The central vowels are in free variation with other vowels in the dialect. All the vowels occur in word initial, word medial and word final positions except the c...

Gemination in the Igbo language has been shown to be a phonetic phenomenon which occurs as a result of vowel elision between two identical consonants in rapid speech. However, investigations into other languages seem to suggest that consonant gemination could be a phonological phenomenon. This paper investigates the Òwère dialect (OD) of Igbo with respect to gemination. Employing a descriptive approach, the study discovers that many consonants become realized as geminates in the normal flowing speech of the native speakers, basically as a result of the elision of a high vowel in between two identical consonants. Since it has become the normal way of speaking except for emphasis among the Owere dialect users, one may conclude that consonant geminate formation is ongoing in OD. We present in the paper instances were these 'geminates' could contrast with non-geminates using minimal pairs and near minimal pairs.