LEXICOSTATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND YAMBA ORTHOGRAPHY DEVELOPMENT

Language and education

This study sets out to examine the importance of lexicostatistical analysis in the development of an acceptable orthography for multi-dialectal communities like Yamba with 17 dialects. Many intractable orthography problems prevail with the extant Yamba standard reference orthography. These problems stem from the acceptability factor to the usage of materials produced in the language using the Mbem dialect as the reference dialect. The data for this work was collected using an eclectic method. To answer the main research question of this paper which is: how can lexicostatistical analysis aid in orthography development in a multidialectal languages, questionnaires, structured interview, Swadesh wordlist and archive were used as the research instruments. The objectives of this paper are to examine the validity of lexicostatistical analysis in orthography development for multidialectal languages and to propose an alternative way of developing orthographies for multidialectal languages. The analysis of the data was done using Transformational Generative Grammar and Generative phonology theories. The results indicated diverse intelligibility levels between all the dialects of Yamba. Developing supplementary orthographies for dialects with as low as 30% intelligibility supports the use of the orthographies to do mother tongue literacy. Therefore, orthography development for languages with multiplicity of dialect can be achieved only after a thorough lexicostatistical analysis that establishes the levels of intelligibility between the dialects.

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