Vowel deletion in Àbèsàbèsì

Abstract

Àbèsàbèsì1 is an endangered Nigerian language spoken in nine settlementswithin the Akoko North East and Akoko North West Local GovernmentAreas (LGA) of Ondo State by an estimated total of less than 7,000 speakers.In this language, as in many other Benue-Congo languages, it is a commoncase that two vowels meet across a word boundary. Among differentphonological processes that are triggered by the occurrence of two soundsat morphological boundary are: segment harmony, deletion/elision,assimilation, dissimilation, coalescence, velarization and palatalization.This paper investigates the phenomenon of vowel deletion in Àbèsàbèsì foran insight into the V1 # V2 vowel deletion in the language. Data collectionadopts a participatory model. The paper attempts a descriptive and rule baseaccount of the types of vowel deletion the language attests. For a betterunderstanding of the segment behaviour, Data collection and presentation islimited to the Èkìròmì dialect as spoken in Ìkáràm. Èkìròmì attests two typesof V1 # V2 vowel deletion and certain environments where no vowel deletiontakes place. This paper attempts to clarify the distributional properties ofthese two types of vowel deletion and to explain the cases where no deletiontakes place. It shows that V1 # V2 vowel deletion, in most cases, affects thefirst of two consecutive vowels (V1) and proposes an explanation of the fewcases, where the second vowel (V2) is affected.
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 1Àbèsàbèsì is known as Akpes in literature and has the ISO-639-3 code ibe and the Glottolog codeakpe1248.