COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ÌKÁLÈ, IJÈSHÀ AND STANDARD YORÙBÁ.

Abstract

This work was a comparative study of  standard yoruba, Ikale and Ijesha dialects.The objectives of this study was to find out the areas of similarities and differences of the lexical items of theses dialects with the language,the phonological variation and toexamine the level of mutual intelligibility that exists among them. Data were collected from native speakers using the Ibadan Four Hundred Word List and 3 native speakers of  the dialects.These dialects with the language were compared using lexicostatistic analysis. This analysis was used as the framework  for standard Yorùbá, Ikale,and Ijesha dialect to determine the level of lexical correspondence. The techniques of these study was based on structured interview and audio recording. We found out that there is a higher cognate percentage between Ikale and Standard Yoruba with 78% cognates, with Ijesha and Standard Yoruba having 73.25% cognates and Ikale and Ijesha with 64.25% cognates. This work  concluded that both Ijesha and Ikale are dialects of Yoruba but there’s an high level of relatedness and mutual intelligibility between Ikale dialect and Standard Yoruba than Ijesha and Yoruba. While the level of mutual intelligibility between Ijesha and Ikale is less.