A Test for Mutual Intelligibility Between Asa Dialect and Standard Igbo

This study is a test for mutual intelligibility between Asa dialect of Abia State and the Standard Igbo. The aim of the study is to examine the mutual intelligibility between Asa dialect, Ukwa West Local Government Area, Abia State and Standard Igbo, focusing on linguistic and communicative aspects to assess their degree of comprehensibility and similarity. The study relied solely on utterances gathered from primary sources. The Swadesh 207 word list was used to aid the data collection.The data was collected from four (4) native speakers (3 men and 1 woman) who are citizens of Abia State where the Asa dialect is spoken and intelligible among the speakers. The collection procedures engaged the informants by interviewing them and engaging them using the Swadesh wordlist of 207 basic items. The theoretical framework adopted in the study was lexicostatistics which was developed by Swadesh in the 1950s. The findings revealed that the result for the lexical comparison of relatedness between Asa and Igbo as 61.5% related, while 38.5% unrelated which means that they are not mutually intelligible and native speakers of Asa and Speakers of Standard Igbo only may not understand each other prior to unfamiliarity in some words. The research recommends further research be carried out on this particular linguistic field, using other branches such as the morphology of Asa dialect and other dialects of Igbo, with the intention of bringing out the various parameters that are at work in individual dialects of Igbo.