A Lexico-syntactic Comparative Analysis of Ondo and Ikale Dialects of the Yoruba Language

Abstract

The study was a comparative study of Ondo and Ikale dialects of the Yoruba language with a view to finding out the areas of convergences and divergences between the two dialects. The study was based on 50 sentences selected from each of the dialects, but only 25 of the sentences were presented and used in this study. They were anaylsed from the perspective of Halliday Systemic Function Grammar (SFG) in order to identify the prominent lexemes and syntactic structures in the two dialects. Simple statistics based on percentages was used to calculate the number of lexemes and structures that are similar and different. It was discovered that the two dialects have basically the same lexemes at both subject and predicator levels. This shows that the speakers of the two dialects often make use of the same nominal and verbal items in their speeches. Besides, the two dialects share basically the same syntactic components – Subjects, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct as found in all the sentences examined. The dialects are however, found to be mainly different in the area of auxiliary verbs. Most of the words or lexemes in the dialects are also found in the standard Yoruba language, hence the mutual intelligibility of the two dialects to an average Yoruba language native speaker. It is thus envisaged that other dialects of Yoruba language that are geographically close may equally share similar linguistic features in the areas of lexemes and syntax.