Izere is a
dialect continuum of
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 speaker ...
in
Nigeria
Nigeria, 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 Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...
. 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 (or rarely echoism) is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetics, phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as Oin ...
.
Consonants
The consonant
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
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 in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis ...
(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