THE PHONETIC AND PHONEMIC DISTRIBUTIONS OF ‘AN’, ‘S̩ ’, ‘GW’ AND /GH/ IN IFÈ̩̩ DIALECT
THE PHONETIC AND PHONEMIC DISTRIBUTIONS OF ‘AN’, ‘S̩ ’, ‘GW’ AND /GH/ IN IFÈ̩̩ DIALECT

Summary/Abstract: The ife ̩̀ dialect has some linguistic peculiarities that establish it as a dialect of the Yorùbálanguage. However, many of these linguistic distinctiveness have remained elusive to the literary studies in Yorubalinguistics. This paper discusses the phonetic and phonemic distinctive distributions of /an, s, gw, and gh/ inphonotactic constituencies in the Ife ̩̀ dialect extensively. The paper uses standard Yoruba as the reference languagefor each phonological description. The data collected in Adéwo lé (2021) were used to support many claims in eachphonotactic constituency. The data used were descriptively analyzed in tandem with generative theory’s principles.Our findings revealed that vowel ‘an ’ is more extensively used in Ife ̩̀ than standard Yoruba, where ‘an ’ and ‘o n’ arebasically allophones of the same phoneme. ‘ʃ’ as a phoneme stands for ‘s’ and ‘ʃ’, in distributive phonologicalconstituencies as occurring in the standard Yoruba in Ife ̩̀ dialect. ‘Gh’ and ‘gw’ are allophones of the same phonemein the Ife ̩̀ dialect. The paper testifies that ‘gh’ is the underlying phoneme because it has larger phonotactic distributionsthan ‘gw’. Basically, ‘gh’ co-occurs with the vowels with the plus Advance Tongue Root feature, while ‘gw’harmonies with the vowels having the minus Advance Tongue Root feature. It is hoped that this paper has broughtnew findings on the phonetic description of ‘an ’, ‘s’, ‘gh’, and ‘gw’ in Ife ̩̀ to the fore and also added to the intuitiveconsciousness of the native speakers of the Yoruba language in general.

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