THE DELETION OF THE LAST CONSONANT IN A CONSONANT CLUSTER AT THE CODA BY PLATEAU SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH IN NORTH CENTRAL NIGERIA

Abstract

This paper examines the deletion of the last consonant in a consonant cluster at the coda by Plateau speakers of English in North Central Nigeria. When a word ends in two or three consonants, speakers of English from Plateau State, North Central part of the country, usually delete the last one during speech. This has been of keen interest to the researcher, and therefore decides to investigate the phenomenon that leads to this incidence as a way of proffering a linguistic explanation to it. To do this, a total of twenty-two sentences containing words that end in two or three consonants were used as data elicitation technique from some of these speakers or users of English, and that forms the first part of data collected for this study. The words whose last consonants are deleted word-finally are transcribed phonetically for purposes of clarity. The second part of the data constitutes the elicitation of six words of common nouns each from ten indigenous languages of Plateau. This is so done with a view to discovering whether there is evidence of consonant cluster in those languages or not, either at the onset or coda in order for the researcher to pin down the factor responsible for the deletion. From there, the study concludes that there is no evidence of consonant cluster at the coda in Plateau languages, and where it does, it only exists as digraph, as in: shīk-bīsh ‘sin’, kàt-ɗang ‘if’ (Mwaghavul); kámbo̟ng ‘cocoyam’ (Ron); ìsho̟sh ‘honey bee’, nànámàng ‘girls’ (Afizere); ìkpáng ‘plate’, ǹding ‘water’ (Tarok), etc.