Phoneme /h/ and its Allophones in the South-East Yoruba (SEY) Dialects: An Optimality Theory Account

It is known that an allophone is a non-contrastive segment. Less attention is given to its understanding because most scholars believe it is narrow in nature but there are more to allophonic variations across dialects of a language than what we know in the standard form of such language. Yorùbá is not exempted on this.

Most (typical) native speakers of Yorùbá language find it difficult to produce /h/ in their day-to-day conversation which is why phoneme /h/ is mostly replaced with other sound (s) or totally deleted in most dialects of Yorùbá. Can we say phoneme /h/ does not exist in Yorùbá dialects?

This paper reveals there are more to phoneme /h/ and its allophones in the South-East Yorùbá than what we know in Standard Yorùbá. Three SEY dialects were selected for this study. They include Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀bú, and Ìkálẹ̀ dialects, in order to have a good work on phoneme /h/ and its allophones in the SEY dialects.