The Reality of Consonant Clusters in Dagbanli Syllables

Abstract

There have been propositions that there are consonant clusters in Dagbanli even though the language is predominantly an open syllable one with only three nasal consonants that serve the purpose of coda in the Dagbbanli syllable. The study was to ascertain the existence of consonant clusters in Dagbanli syllables. Speeches of two male and two female respondents were recorded using the PRAAT programme. The words, phrases, and sentences were carefully selected to contain the syllables suspected to exhibit consonant clusters. These were subjected to spectrographic analysis to identify vowels, (if they exist) so as to determine whether they are really clusters or not. The results indicated some weak vowels between the ‘clusters’ thus proving that they are not clusters after all.