Linguistic Features Observed in Hausa Spoken by Karai-Karai in Kukar Gadu and Its Environs

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to examine the linguistic features in Hausaspoken by Karai-Karailiving in Kukar-Gadu and its environs. The study presents 4 features which are so peculiar. They are insertion of velar ejective voiceless /q/ consonant sound such as qaayaa as in ayaa ‘tiger nut', qaauree as in aureeetc.ii. De-bilabialisation of the bilabial, nasal, plosive, voiced /m/ sound with alveolar nasal voiced /Å‹/ phoneme as in atamfaa becomes atanfaa‘wrapper',damshi becomes danshi ‘moisture etc.iii. Deletion of velar, ejective, voiceless /q/ consonant sound as in qaaragoo becomes?' araagoo ‘groundnut cake' andqafa becomes ‘?afaa. iv. Substitution of alveolar lateral voiced /l/ sound with labio velar, approximant voiced /w/ sound as in lokaci becomes wokaci ‘time' and low vowel /a/ substituted high back vowel /u/ respectively. The paper adopted Donegen, S.S. (1979) theory of natural phonology. Unstructured interview and native speaker intuition was employed in making inferences in the study. The findings reveal that not only the Karai-Karai, Fulani but also the Ngamos among others that lives in the area that the said features can be observed in their speeches while pronouncing some names in respective of age or gender and the meaning of the word remains unchanged.Lastly, the paper discovered some sounds which appeared neither in word initial, medial nor word-final position but are not incorporated into Karai-Karai alphabets. They are /mb/ as in mbủxu ‘mold', mbandi ‘things', /kw/ as in talakwa ‘tuesday' bunkwu ‘hide', /o/ as in á»yum ‘money', oci ‘goat' etc.