LANGUAGE VARIATION BETWEEN THE SIDA AND GAYIL DIALECTS OF AARAPH: A STUDY IN PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGY

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the phonological and morphological variations between the Sida and Gayil dialects of Aaraph. The study was conducted in the mixed research design. Accordingly, purposive sampling technique was used to select the informants of the research. Besides, elicitation and audio-recording were used to collect the data from both Sida and Gayil dialects. The data were analyzed by examining the differences in the phonological, morphological and lexical structure of the dialects under investigation. The data analysis was done both in qualitative and quantitative methods. As a result, the research findings have shown that there are significant sets of phonological and morphological as well as lexical variations between the two dialects. Regarding the phonological aspects, the study identified that the phonological differences are contextually-unconditioned changes of sounds. This context-free phonological variation is the substitution of sounds between the two dialects. Accordingly, the following sounds substitute each other in some words of the Sida and Gayil dialects: /s/ /ʃ/, /z/ /ʒ/, /ʦ/ /ʧ/, /ʦ’/ /ʧ’/, /q/ /k’/ and /ɪ/ /a/. The study also identified that the voiceless velar ejective stop /k’/ is a distinctive phoneme in the Gayil dialect of Aaraph, and it is always substituted by /q/ in the Sida dialect. In the case of the morphological aspects, variations take place in several tense inflections, person and accusative markers, verb forms and different pronoun types of the Sida and Gayil dialects. These morphological changes include: /-se/ / ʃe/, /-am/ /-ɪm/, /-sɪjɒ/ /-ɪsɒ/, /-ee/ /re/, /-de/ /-da/, /-e/ or /-se/ /-aare/ or /-saare/ and other pronoun changes as well. Moreover, the investigation of the lexical variations has shown that the Sida and Gayil dialects share 79% of their 206 basic lexical items; i.e., they have 162 cognates from the total of 206 words; this indicates that the two dialects are closely related. In addition, the ratio of the total degree of phonetic differences per corresponding phonemes shows a value of 29%, and this lower ratio is another indicator for the close relationship between the two varieties. Furthermore, the researcher recommends that to get the overall picture of the variations between the two dialects further studies are needed in the related areas such as grammatical variations.