SOUND SYSTEM OF NYIFON: A PRELIMENARY STUDY

Abstract

This work is a preliminary study of the sound system of the Nyifon language, a register tone language which belongs to the Jukunoid group of East Benue Congo family of languages. Nyifon language is one of the endangered minority languages spoken in Benue State of Nigeria. Based on the parameters of measuring endangered languages, the language is classified as being ''definitely endangered'' in the sense that children no longer learn it as mother tongue in the home. More unfortunately, the language has not received considerable study attention as research has shown that the only evidence of study in the language are the historical books depicting the origin and the culture of Nyifon. This paper, therefore, examines the speech sounds of the Nyifon language, their number and how they occur in the language. Through partially structured oral interview and the use of one thousand, seven hundred SIL Comparative African Wordlist (SILCAWL), data for this study were elicited from four informants (native speakers) from each of the ten communities that make up Nyifon, making it a total of forty informants. The study finds out that Nyifon is made up of thirty-one consonants and nine oral vowels, which were described in terms of the articulatory gestures used to produce them. For the phonemes we identified, we devised their letter symbols in order to help in developing a writing system for Nyifon. The study also observed that tone is phonemic in Nyifon and the language has four tones: high, low, downstep and high falling contour tone. The vowels and the syllabic nasals are the tone bearing units in the language. Finally, the study is an immense cont