Vowel Deletion in Àbèsàbèsì A CASE STUDY OF ÈKÌRÒMÌ

Àbèsàbèsì 1 is an endangered Nigerian language spoken in nine settlements within the Akoko North East and Akoko North West Local Government Areas (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 common case that two vowels meet across a word boundary. Among different phonological processes that are triggered by the occurrence of two sounds at morphological boundary are: segment harmony, deletion/elision, assimilation, dissimilation, coalescence, velarization and palatalization. This paper investigates the phenomenon of vowel deletion in Àbèsàbèsì for an insight into the V 1 # V 2 vowel deletion in the language. Data collection adopts a participatory model. The paper attempts a descriptive and rule base account of the types of vowel deletion the language attests. For a better understanding of the segment behaviour, Data collection and presentation is limited to the Èkìròmì dialect as spoken in Ìkáràm. Èkìròmì attests two types of V 1 # V 2 vowel deletion and certain environments where no vowel deletion takes place. This paper attempts to clarify the distributional properties of these two types of vowel deletion and to explain the cases where no deletion takes place. It shows that V 1 # V 2 vowel deletion, in most cases, affects the first of two consecutive vowels (V 1 ) and proposes an explanation of the few cases, where the second vowel (V 2 ) is affected.