A Comparative Study of the Kalenjin Dialects

Abstract

Comparative linguistics is a study which mainly focuses on comparing languages with a view of establishing their relatedness. It is involved in the comparison and classification of languages. As a practice, languages are compared and thereafter grouped according to three different principles: genetic, areal and typological. This study focused on genetic classification of the Kalenjin dialects. The language family is the basic component of genetic classification. A language family therefore, is the set of languages for which it can be proved that they developed from a single ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. Comparative study of the Kalenjin dialects has not been done and this is deduced from existing literature. This necessitated the study to be undertaken to determine the genetic relatedness of the Kalenjin dialects. The study aimed at justifying the mutual intelligibility among the Kalenjin dialects. The proposed study was guided by three objectives: establish whether the Kalenjin dialects are genetically related, reconstruct the pre-history of the Kalenjin dialects and determine the lexical variations of the Kalenjin dialects. The study was guided by the concept of the genetic tree diagram. The study intended to employ qualitative method in which ethnographic design was applicable. The researcher intends to collect open-ended, emerging data with the intent of developing themes from the same. The sample in this study was selected from native speakers of five Kalenjin dialects, who form the target population. The sample size comprised of 150 respondents with each of the Kalenjin dialects represented by 10 subjects. Purposive sampling technique was used in the selection of subjects from each dialect. The main instrument of data collection in this study was tape recording. The comparative method then be involved in data analysis. This study would contribute new knowledge in the fields of sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. The study established that the Kalenjin dialects are genealogically related. This is due to the resemblances of majority of the cognate terms across the dialects which include vocabulary areas involving kinship terms, domestic animals, food stuffs, human anatomy, days of the week, verbs and different times of the day. Based on the study objectives, it was recommended that Study of the individual Kalenjin dialects and a comparative study of other related Kenyan languages should be done. The study suggested that a further study should be done on reconstruction of proto Kalenjin language and a study of language use and gender in the Kalenjin dialects should be done.