A Phonological Study of Consonants and Vowels Phonemic Merger in Hausa

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INTRODUCTION
Every language has varieties of speech that show some degree of correlation with the social and geographical structure of the society.It is also obvious that every natural language has an independent phonological system reflecting the different types of sounds that it happens to have.If a language is spoken by thousands or millions of people, variation of usage manifests in terms of phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics etc.In the present work, some lexical items from standard Hausa and some regional dialects under study will be examined with the aim of finding out phonemes that undergo changes in certain environments toward the realization of phonemic merger in Hausa.Phonologically, a lexical item is represented as a linear sequence of segments, each segment is specified with respect to distinctive phonological information.In this work, we shall examine how phonological and morphological processes relate underlying forms with their phonetic representations; however, some phonological changes are automatic ones while some are non-automatic.This research is purely on analysis of consonants and vowels phonemic merger in Hausa.Phonological processes are a systematic alternations or changes that sounds undergo depending on their positions in words or across word boundaries.Yul-Ifode (2014) asserted that "phonological processes are those changes which segments undergo that result in the various phonetic realizations of underling phonological segments".Phonological processes refers to a situation where segments of neighboring morphemes that becomes juxtaposed undergo change when they are combine to form words or other than those in which two morphemes come together (Schane, 1973).These processes are governed by phonological rules which generalization about the different ways a sound can be pronounced in different environments.(Hayes, 2009).Goldsmith (1995) explored phonological rules as "the devices employed by the phonological theory to account for the relationship between representations at different levels".Additionally, phonological rules could be described as a mapping between underlying level and surface level of phonological representation.According to Sani (1989), phoneme is an abstract unit of distinctive/contrastive sound in a language.As for merger, Matthews (2007) stated that "merger is a change by which two units that were once distinct become one and the same, especially in phonology".However, there are forty seven (47) phonemes in Hausa, comprising thirty four (34) consonant and thirteen (13) vowels.These Hausa consonants are succinctly described by Sani (2005) "as a speech sounds which are produced with the obstruction of airstream.The obstruction could be partial or total".More so, in the articulation of consonants sounds three things are always put into consideration, thus, place of articulation, manner of articulation and state of the glottis.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Phonology as a core area of Linguistics, has a keen interest by many scholars which triggered a lot of scholarly researches in Hausa language.These researches were contributions made by some of the Hausa scholars in relation to automatic and non-automatic phonological changes in Hausa.The most famous among them are the works of Zaria (1982), Abubakar (1983), Bagari (1983/85), Bello (1985), Sani (2001) and Baba (1993/1998). Zaria (1982) emphasized on sound correspondences, distinguishing one dialect from another; Abubakar (1983) discussed dialectal variations from phonological perspective; Bagari (1983Bagari ( /1985) ) examined pvcs that end in long vowel /o:/ in syllable final position of Hausa common nouns; Bello (1985) investigates merger in relation to English loanwords in Hausa and cited examples on how the sounds of certain English loanwords merged with Hausa sounds; Sani (2001) studied the behavior of back consonants /k/ // and /g/ in relation to vowel alternation; Baba(1993Baba( /1998) ) examines pluractional verb forms where he touched on two variants of prefixal reduplication when forming pluractional in Hausa.

METHODOLOGY
This research is designed to be qualitative and descriptive in nature.According to Yule ( 2006) "qualitative research is a type of research that describes a phenomenon in words instead of number or measure".In qualitative-based research, data are often collected through interviews, observations, and focus groups, within the analysis indentifying patterns across cases to provide a descriptive of this pattern (Milerday & Micheller 2004:17).

Area of Study
As explored earlier that, this research investigated Hausa consonants and vowels phonemic merger from phonological perspective in particular phonetic environments.The area of study for this research comprised some of the Eastern (Kano, Daura, Katsina, and Bauchi) and Western (Zazzau, Ikara, Sokoto,) geographical zones of Hausa land.

Informants
The best data gathering technique in conducting a research of this nature is for the researcher to meet his informants from whom he would get the relevant data.In this regard, a substantial number of Hausa speakers from the area of the study mentioned above were met and interacted and their normal and natural speech habits were carefully examined in the course of obtaining the data needed for realization of the phonemic merger in Hausa.Besides, the two research assistants were selected and involved in the selection of the informants to be interviewed.The informants were from different categories based on age (ranging from 16-86), sex (males and females) as well as educational background (Islamic and Western education) were considered.

Data Collection Procedures
An interview, observations, focus groups and native speaker's intuition will be procedures for the data collection of this research.Additionally, this research will partially rely on a handful of essential books, especially dictionaries of English-Hausa and other various relevant materials written by some of the eminent scholars mentioned in the literature section.In the course of data collection, interview in this type of research that concerns speech is inevitable.Hence, the researchers will interview different Hausa speakers at the site of the research mentioned above with the aim of examining phonological processes and phonemic merger in Hausa vowel and consonant phonemes.

Method of Data Analysis
The analysis of the data for this research will be based on the generative phonological theory.Therefore, generative phonology deals with the task of establishing the set of distinctive features and the properties of phonological rules of world languages.According to Schane (1973) "distinctive features are minimal elements" while Stampe (1973) asserts it as "the ad hoc abbreviations of features bundles that can take one of the values: +(plus) or -(minus)".Nevertheless, Our choice to adopt this theory, is reasonably based on its ability to address critically the analysis of phonological processes and merger in Hausa.

Data Presentation and Analysis
This section presented the interpretation and analysis of the data extracted from handful of essential books, especially dictionaries of English-Hausa and other various relevant materials written by some of the eminent scholars mentioned in the literature section.The data discover three phonological processes that motivate consonant and vowel phonemic merger in Hausa.The identified phonological processes are: palatalization, rhotacization and deletion motivating phonemic merger.Sani (1989) defined palatalization as "to add a palatal articulation (raise the front of the tongue towards the hard palate) to a non-palatal consonant under certain conditions."The condition governing palatalization is where a vowel /i/ or /e/ immediately follows certain consonants under particular circumstances.Palatalization, as a phonological process has become productively active in the study of Hausa phonology.(cf.Abubakar, 1983, Sani, 1989and Baba,1993).This productive phonological process applies within and outside morpheme boundary, when it apples morpheme-internally, it is phonologically motivated and it is automatic.Conversely, when it applies across morpheme-boundary, it is morphophonologically motivated and it results in nonautomatic phonological changes.In a nutshell, there are two types of palatalization, automatic and non-automatic.Automatic palatalization does not trigger phonemic merger in Hausa; it is nonautomatic palatalization that motivates phonemic merger.This category of palatalization involves pvcs /k/ /q/ and /g/.The three pvcs palatalized to /kj/,/qj/ and /gj/ in Hausa when they are immediately followed by the vowel /el.In this context, phonemic merger is morphophonologically motivated across boundary where any of the three pvcs precedes the vowel/e/ alone.Consider the following examples:

Palatalization Motivating Phonemic Merger
(1) Gloss /wa:ke:/ (U.R.) bean wa:k j e: palatalization wa:k j e:n suffixation of referential/-n wa:k j en vowel reduction wa:k j en centralization wa:k j ēn velrization of /n/ wa:k j ēn tone assignment [wa:k j en] (S.R.) (Merger of/k/with the phoneme/kj/).( 2) Gloss /wa:qe:/ (U.R.) religious poem wa:q j e: palatalization wa:q w e:n suffixation of refential /-n wa:q j en vowel reduction wa:q w en centralization wa:q w en nasalization wa:q w en velarization of /n/ wa:q w en tone assignment [wa:q w en] (S.R.) (Merger of/q/with the phoneme/qj/).( 3) Gloss /hange:/ (U.R.) foresight hang j e palatalization hang j en suffixation of referential /-n hang j en vowel reduction hang j en centralization hang j en nasalization hang j en velarization of /n/ hàng j en tone assignment [hàng j en] (S.R) (Merger of/g/with the phoneme/gj/) However, it is noteworthy that these non-automatic morphophonological changes apply only where pvcs/k/,/q/and/g/precede the vowel /e/ not /i/.Below is a rule to account for this phonemic change: -

Non-Automatic Palatalization Motivating Phonemic Merger
Non-automatic palatalization applies across morpheme boundary and it is morphophonologically conditioned.It has been observed that palatalization in Hausa is very productive based on researches conducted by some eminent scholars, (cf.Abubakar, 1983,Sani,1989and Baba, 1993) even though the environment the palatalizationtakes place is phonetically natural (automatic ).In this context, we shall examine how palatalization in morphological contexts operate on nonsonorant coronals /s/,/t/,/d/ and /z/ as well as labio-velar approximant /w/ to find how phonemic merger is motivated in non-automatic condition.Here,we shall examine how palatalization operates in plural formation, verb formation, verbo-nominals (gerunds) and ethnonyms.Plurals in Hausa are formed in many ways like reduplication, prefixation, infixationa and suffixation.When forming plurals of certain singular forms that end with non-sonorant coronals /s/, /t/, /d/ and /z/ as well as labio-velar approximant/w/, they undergo palatalization operation and change to/sh/,c/,/j/and/y/ before the vowel/i/or/e/by duplicating the final consonant of the singular form by adding a plural suffix /-i/ or /e/to the stem of the singular form and trigger phonemic merger from morphological point of view.Consider the following examples: In Hausa, some lexical items of singular forms that end with the phoneme [s] before the vowel /i / or /e/ become plural where [s] merged with [ʃ] as exemplified below: i. [s] merged with [ʃ] before/i/or /e/