JOSUGA: JOS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

This paper examines and compares the stress and rhythm of Ika and English languages, and to achieve its goal, the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA) was used, since the study involves two different languages. The study used a qualitative approach to research, and words in the two languages were nestled schematically for analysis. The data were generated from the Church of God Mission Sunday sermon in Mbiri, Ika town hall meeting, and music centre in Agbor, and a tape recorder was used. The words were transcribed and translated into English for analysis. The analysis was done by selecting Ika bisyllabic and polysyllabic words in the two languages to establish their stress patterns. The result showed that the two languages have the same stress and syllable patterns at this level of phonological analysis. Examples of sentences were representationally given to prove that Ika and English languages possess rhythm. While the two languages have content words, the presence of articles in the Ika language usually comes after the nouns. The paper concludes that languages are universal and, as such, they share certain things in common.

Open Full Text (PDF)