Are highand Lunguru and lowland Lugulu district dialects?
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Date
2018
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Dar es Salaam
Abstract
Although studies on various aspects of language are conducted on one or several varieties of language, the dialectology of most the African languages has not yet been established. Scholars have been giving a generalised observation with regard to dialectology of languages. This study was developed to question the general observation of dialectology of the Lugulu language, stating that Lugulu has two main dialects: the Highland dialect and the lowland dialect, Methodologically, based on the4ir geographical altitudes, from the Higland locations I selected Bunduki, Kikeo and
Kinole while the Lowland locations I selected Mzinga, Mlali and Doma. The study compared the lexicon and the phonology of the highland and lowland locations to identify their dialectal variations. In the process, the researcher used 272 word: 100 words of Swadesh wordlist and 172 randomly picked from Petzell and Hammastrom (2013). The words were uploaded on GabMap and then the Blair method was manually used to identify lexical variation. The findings show that some highland locations were more similar to the lowland locations that to their counterpart highland locations, so do the lowland locations. Thus, the categorization of Lugulu into Highland dialect and lowland dialect did not reflect the established dialectal variation of the Luguru language, We recommend that more through studies need to be conducted especially on the impact of borrowing on dialectal variation.
Description
Available in print form, East Africana Collection, Dr.Wilbert Chagula Library, class mark (THS EAF P218.T34M67)
Keywords
Distinctive features (Linguistics), Luguru (African People), Dialects, Language and languages, Highland and lowland Luguru
Citation
Moses, G (2018) Are highand Lunguru and lowland Lugulu district dialects?, Masters dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam.