Cloning the linguistic twin sisters: A Comparative Linguistic Study of French and Yoruba Languages

Abstract

Phonology can be defined as the study of sound patterns and their meanings both within and across languages. There are innumerable appraisals of scholars on the phonology of French and Yorùbá languages as twin-sisters with little attention paid to the distinctive variance in their phonemic features. Premised on distinctive feature theory which identifies a set of features adequate for describing the segmental contrasts and phonologically important segment groups observed in languages, this study interrogates the differences in the types of syllables, formation of syllables and the components of the syllabic structures in French and Yorùbá languages with a view to identifying how these two languages negotiate their divergence in phonology and morphology. The study reveals that, that two languages are genetically related does not mean that the two will always share the same phonological, morphological, syntactic and grammatical similarities at all times. This study argues that the only workable way out of phonological, morphological, syntactic and grammatical difficulties for Yorubaphone French language learners is not via cloning the linguistic twin sisters.