Author(s)

Ojo George Adekunle

Department of English and Literary Studies, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria.

This paper discusses deviant realization of borrowed phonemes from English into Yorùbá. It is not gainsaying that when a foreign phoneme enters into the syllable structure of English it changes its tongue position both horizontally and vertically. The reason for this change is not far-fetched. Since the majority of the foreign phonemes are absent in native languages, they tend to be substituted with the closest phonemes in the recipient language. This paper has been able to account for the various substitutions of foreign vowels that occur in the speech-form of Nigerians who code-mix English with Yorùbá in their daily conversations. This has been done through the analysis of corpus of data collected from the existing foreign words as spoken by Yoruba-English bilinguals. The result of analysis shows that two or more foreign phonemes become one native phoneme that is entirely different from the input when processed in the recipient language.

Borrowing, Phoneme, Language, Vowels, Substitution

Adekunle, O. (2014) Deviant Realization of Foreign Vowels in the Speech-Form of Yoruba-English Nigerian Bilinguals. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 4, 720-727. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2014.45062.