PHONOLOGICAL CHANGES IN IJESA DIALECT OF YORUBA

Abstract

Existing scholarly works on Ijesa focus mainly on the syntactic aspect of the dialect with little or no attention to the phonological aspect. Given the fundamental nature of the sound system of human languages, the objective of this work is to study the phonological feature in Ijesa dialect of Yoruba and compare it with the phonological features of ‘standard’ Yoruba. The paper examines some common phonological components and phonological processes like assimilation, elision and vowel harmony. The study employs both primary and secondary data. The primary data comprised the collection of the four hundred words collection of University of Ibadan in Ijesa dialect. The data were collected from Ijesa community from the informants that were above forty years of age. The secondary data comprised thesis, textbooks, academic journals articles that contain the works of existing scholars. The study concludes that the Ijesa dialect of Yoruba language has distinct phonological features which mark it differently from the standard Yoruba language.