Izere is a

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...

Plateau languages The forty or so Plateau languages are a tentative group of Benue–Congo languages spoken by 15 million people on the Jos Plateau, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa State and in adjacent areas in central Nigeria. Berom and Eggon have the most speak ...

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 of G ...

. According to Blench (2008), it is four languages, though ''Ethnologue'' does not distinguish NW and NE Izere. The Cen and Ganang varieties are spoken by only 2000 each. Cen has added Berom noun-class prefixes and consonant alternation to an Izere base.

Dialects

Blench (2019) lists the following Izere dialects. *Fobur *Northeastern (Federe) *Southern (Foron) *Ichèn *Faishang *Ganang

Phonology

The Izere phonetic inventory includes 29 consonants and seven vowels and distinguishes three tone levels; two additional contour tones appear only rarely, in loanwords and due to

onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...

Consonants

The consonant

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s of Izere are shown in the following table.

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Izere are shown in the following table.

Tonemes

There are three level (L, M & H) and two contour

tonemes Tone is the use of pitch (music), pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflection, inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic infor ...

(LM & HL) in Izere; the latter two are found only in loanwords and onomatopoeia.

References

*Blench (2008
''Prospecting proto-Plateau''
Manuscript.

External links

{{Platoid languages Central Plateau languages Languages of Nigeria