Akpes (Àbèsàbèsì) is an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

. It is spoken by approximately 7,000 speakers in the North of

Ondo State Ondo State ( yo, Ìpínlẹ̀ Oǹdó) is a state in southwestern Nigeria. It was created on 3 February 1976 from the former Western State. It borders Ekiti State to the north, Kogi State to the northeast, Edo State to the east, Delta State to t ...

. The language is surrounded by several other languages of the Akoko area, where

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...

is the lingua franca.

replaces Akpes in more and more informal domains and thus forwards a gradual shift from Akpes towards

. Akpes is generally attributed to the Volta-Congo Branch of the Niger-Congo phylum.

Name

The language is commonly referred to as 'Akpes' in literature. As this term is in fact the name of one of the four dialects, it is not supported by the whole speaker community. A meeting of representatives of all nine settlements has coined the term 'Abesabesi' to denote the language. It is a reduplication of the word ''àbès'' meaning 'we'.Agoyi, T. O. (2008). ''The phonology of Àbèsàbèsì vowel harmony (Unpublished PhD thesis)''. University of Ilorin.

Distribution and varieties

Abesabesi is spoken in nine different settlements in the

Akoko North East Akoko North-East is a Local Government Area in Ondo State, Nigeria. Its headquarters is in the town of Ikare. Ikare consist of 15 districts or towns, namely: Okela, Okorun, Eshe, Odo, Ilepa, Okoja, Iku, Odeyare, Odoruwa, ...

and

Akoko North West Akoko North-West is a local government area in Ondo State, Nigeria. Its headquarters is in the town of Okeagbe. It has an area of 512 km2 and a population of 213,792 at the 2006 census. The postal code of the area is 342. Town and village ...

LGAs of

. While Àkùnnù, Àsẹ̀, Gèdègédé, Ìbáràmù, Ìkáràmù, and Ìyànì are independent towns, three settlements form a quarter of the multilingual town Àjọwá: Dája, Ẹ̀ṣùkù, Ìlúdọ̀tun (also: Ìlọ̀dùn or Àkùnnù Àjọwá). The quarter Efifa of Ajowa used to speak Akpes in the past but switched to the local

variety Owe. Agoyi (2009) classifies the varieties of these nine settlements into four dialects: Akpes, Èkiròmì, Èṣùkù, Ìluẹnì. Her analysis is mostly based on differences in lexicon and phonemics (especially vowel harmony). All dialects are mutually intelligible. Below is a table of all dialects, the settlements they are spoken in, and alternate names.

Genetic affiliation

While most scholars attribute Abesabesi somewhere in the Volta-Niger branch of Niger-Congo, its exact position within this branch is disputed. Some claimed that it forms a separate sub-branch and others claimed a closer relationship to the

Edoid languages The Edoid languages are a few dozen languages spoken in Southern Nigeria, predominantly in the former Bendel State. The name ''Edoid'' derives from its most widely spoken member, Edo, the language of Benin City, which has 25 million native and ...

or Ukaan. The

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...

4.0 classifies Abesabesi as most closely related to the

Ukaan language Ukaan (also Ikan, Anyaran, Auga, or Kakumo) is a poorly described Niger–Congo language or dialect cluster of uncertain affiliation. Roger Blench suspects, based on wordlists, that it might be closest to the (East) Benue–Congo languages (or, ...

.Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4
(October 2013).

Phonology

Abesabesi has a rich phoneme inventory comprising labial-velar and

labialized Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve ...

consonants and an

advanced tongue root In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mong ...

(ATR) distinction for the oral mid vowels. The orthography used here follows

Lau Lau or LAU may refer to: People * Lau (surname) * Liu (劉/刘), a common Chinese family name transliterated Lau in Cantonese and Hokkien * Lau clan, one of the Saraswat Brahmin clans of Punjab * LAU (musician): Laura Fares Places * Lebane ...

(2020), which is based on

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

. Abesabesi is a tonal language with a high, a mid, and a low tone. These tones are symbolized through an

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...

, no accent, or

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...

on the tone-bearing unit. All three tones are lexical tones. However, the high tone only rarely appears on base

lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...

s but is often used as grammatical tone marking the mood of a clause, possession, location, or relativization. Frequent phonological processes in Abesabesi include

vowel deletion In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run toget ...

, assimilation, and

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...

. A syllable can have the structure N (syllabic nasal) or (C)V(V)(C). Closed syllables only appear at the end of a word and are likely to have resulted from word final vowel deletion.

Vowels

Abesabesi exhibits seven oral and five nasal vowels. While an

ATR ATR may refer to: Medicine * Acute transfusion reaction * Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related, a protein involved in DNA damage repair Science and mathematics * Advanced Test Reactor, nuclear research reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, ...

distinction exists for the oral mid vowels (/o/ vs. /ɔ/ and /e/ vs. /ɛ/), nasal vowels do not differentiate +ATR from -ATR (/ɔ̃/ and /ɛ̃/).

Consonants

Abesabesi's consonant inventory consists of 29 consonants. While 20 of these consonants are frequently used in lexemes, nine only appear marginally (indicated in parentheses). Many of these marginal consonants are labialized equivalents of stops, nasals, and fricatives, such as //, //, and //. Agoyi treats these consonants as a result of deleted rounded vowels. The phoneme /ʃ/ can be realized as �or as the affricate ͜ʃ

References

External links

Abesabesi language blog

Collection Àbèsàbèsì
- ELAR, SOAS, University of London
Abesabesi language documentation and maintenance

Akpes basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{Niger-Congo branches Volta–Niger languages