This study centres on reflecting the pronunciation of lemmas in a proposed multilingual dictionary of Lukumi, Olukumi and Yoruba. It shows how the differences and similarities in their pronunciation can be displayed in the proposed dictionary. Lukumi is spoken in Cuba while Olukumi and Yoruba are spoken in Nigeria. The parent language, Yoruba, was used as a reference point to highlight the etymology of Lukumi and Olukumi as well as to buttress their similarities. Two downloaded Lukumi wordlists making up 134 words were used to elicit information on Olukumi equivalents through oral interview. Twenty-two words are used as sample entries. Following Mashamaite's method of promoting the compilation of bilingual dictionaries between African languages, the study presents Lukumi as the source language while Olukumi and Yoruba are the target languages; English translations of the lemmas are shown. The pronunciation of the lemmas is given alongside their meanings and grammatical categories. No dictionary of any Nigerian language has pronunciation of headwords given; hence this study is a positive innovation; also, the display of pronunciation provides evidence of the similarities shared by the three languages. The transcription of the lemmas serves as a good learning aid for the language learners. The dictionary will go a long way to preserve the endangered Lukumi and Olukumi languages.

Ika is a dialect of the Igbo language spoken in Ika South and Ika North East Local Government Areas of Delta State and the Igbanke area of Edo State in Nigeria. It belongs to the Niger Igbo cluster of dialects (Ikekeonwu 1986) spoken in areas bordering the west of the River Niger; Nwaozuzu (2008) refers to these dialects as West Niger Group of Dialects. A word list of Ika, written by Williamson (1968), was one of the earliest works on Ika and she points out in that work that Ika (and Ukwuani), though regarded as dialects of Igbo, are treated as separate on purely linguistic grounds. Ika phonology differs from that of Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects and this is why the study of Ika has been of major interest to Igbo linguists in recent years. There have been moves to grant Ika a language status, as seen in the assignment of a unique reference code to Ika: the ISO language code for Ika is ISO 639–3 ikk while that for Igbo is ISO 639–3 ibo. Standard Igbo has the same consonants as Ika though the latter has two consonants, /ʃ/and/ʒ/, which do not exist in the Standard dialect. However, the vocalic system of Ika is largely different from that of Standard and some Igbo dialects which have eight vowels. Ika has a nine-vowel system which includes the schwa, which is a variant of some vowels. Furthermore, it has nine nasal vowels; Standard Igbo and other dialects of Igbo have no nasal vowels. Ika manifests intonation in addition to lexical tone. Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects do not manifest intonation in the same way as Ika does; that is, they do not express attitudes and emotions through intonation. They manifest only lexical tone. In an earlier study of Northern Igbo dialects, Ikekeonwu (1986) could only discover the existence of upstep in Abakaliki dialect. Okorji (1991) and Egbeji (1999) have studied the intonation of Umuchu, an inland West dialect of Igbo. Their findings, particularly Egbeji’s, show that a declarative sentence can be changed to an interrogative one (repetitive question) by use of intonation. This is a syntactic function which can also be likened to what happens in Standard and most other Igbo dialects where the tone of the pronominal subject changes from high to low in the indication of interrogation. At present, therefore, there appears to be no evidence that attitudes and emotions can be expressed through intonation in Umuchu and other Igbo dialects as is observed in Ika.

This study examines the level of speech recognition of English and Igbo utterances by 70 grade four children. The children, whose mother tongue is Igbo and aged between 8 and 10 years, had English monosyllabic words as well as Igbo monosyllabic and disyllabic words dictated to them in noisy and quiet classrooms. The results show that in noise, their level of recognition was significantly higher for English utterances (p < 0.05) while in quiet, it was significantly higher for Igbo (p < 0.05). Thus, the findings confirm those of previous studies that the recognition of Igbo is more affected by noise. In terms of the recognition of phonemes in quiet and noise, for both languages, the 't' test analyses showed significant difference (p < 0.05) in the pupils' recognition of vowels and consonants in both languages, with vowels being more identified than consonants in both noise and quiet. Hence, though the recognition of both languages is hindered in noise, the study of Igbo requires an acoustically serene environment for maximum results.

This paper shows that fundamental frequency, Fo, can be a cue to type of intonation. The work centers on three main intonation patterns in Ika Igbo and English. Ika Igbo is a language that manifests intonation in addition to lexical tone. These intonation patterns are Low Rise (LR), High Rise (HR) and Fall Rise (FR). The Fos of these intonation patterns were analyzed acoustically in utterances with similar phonemes and tunes in both languages. Eighteen utterances were used for the study. The analyses show that the Fos of LR and FR intonation were generally lower than those of HR. Hence it can be concluded that high intonation has high Fo while low intonation has low Fo. It can therefore be concluded that Fo is a cue to type of intonation.

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