A study of consonant distribution in Abureni phonology

Abstract

The Abureni language is currently being documented to preserve it from extinction, having been identified as an endangered minority language in Nigeria. At present, the documentation of the language is still in its early stages, and there is a notable scarcity of literature on it. This study seeks to contribute to ongoing efforts by investigating and documenting the distribution of consonants in Abureni phonology. The Abureni alphabet consists of thirty-five letters, comprising twenty-five consonants and ten vowels. To analyze the language data, the study adopted the general theory of preferential attachment. Specifically, it aimed to identify the word positions of nineteen consonants and six consonant clusters in the Abureni alphabet. A random sample of words from various linguistic domains was collected and categorized into three positional clusters - word-initial, word-medial, and word-final - in order to determine the environments in which each consonant or consonant cluster occurs as an allophone. The analysis reveals that thirteen consonants and two consonant clusters occur only in word-initial and wordmedial positions, but not in word-final position. In contrast, six consonants and four consonant clusters appear across all three word-boundary positions. An important observation is that the occurrence of each consonant within word structures follows a distributional pattern governed by the sound system of Abureni.