A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STANDARD YORUBA AND IKALE DIALECT.

ABSTRACT

A lot has been done on standard Yoruba but very little had been done on Ikale dialect. This project is on a comparative study of standard Yoruba and Ikale dialect. In terms of background literature, the two dialects do not have the same status. The phonology and other aspects of the grammar of Yoruba have been worked on. The focus of the previous literature previewed in this work focused on the linguistic relationship among languages even of the same family. The present study focuses on a comparative study of standard Yoruba and Ikale dialect with the view of finding out the linguistic links between the two languages. It also attempts to understand the similarities and differences between the standard Yoruba originating from Oyo and Ikale dialect spoken in Ondo state. The reason for this is to establish their degree of relatedness and to know if they are mutually intelligible for Ikale to be called a dialect of Yoruba. This study also adopted the comparative method, the lexicostatistic method which was put forward by Swadesh (1955) is an outgrowth of glottochronology which helps in finding the cognates in two or more speech forms to establish their degree of relatedness. The method for data analysis for this study is both primary and secondary. The researcher had a direct contact with six informants in Ikale dialect to get the ikale equivalent of the lexical items in use. Also, about four informants were used to get the standard Yoruba equivalent. The informants are within the age range twenty years and seventy years. These data gathered were carefully transcribed using the phonetic transcription. The data were also observed and compared for accurate information. It has been brought to the notice of the researcher that the degree of lexical similarity between standard Yoruba and Ikale dialect (which is 77.5) is very high and this indicate that a very high degree of mutual intelligibility exist between these speech forms. The conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that Ikale is truly a dialect of Yoruba because it met up with Grimes (1988) standard . This high degree of similarity of the two dialects has implication for traditions and norms(culture) in these dialectal communities since language too is an element of culture.