Canonical Shape Analysis of Hausa and Bole Ideophones

Hausa and Bole are two languages from the same phylum i.e. Afro-asiatic. They have some common various linguistic features, most especially phonological and syntactic features. The main purpose of this paper is to come up with one of the phonological aspects of one of the word classes of Hausa and Bole. This means, we will analyse the syllable structure, which is canonical shape of ideophones of both languages using descriptive method of analysis adopted by Newman (2000). In Hausa, likewise in Bole, ideophones are numerous and several of them are commonly used syntactically. But, we will not deal with their syntactical use or function in this paper, what we focus on, is just their canonical shapes i.e. syllable structures. The paper is divided into four sections: sections one and four are introduction and conclusion respectively, while section two is descriptive analysis of canonical shape of Hausa ideophones, and section three, is of Bole ideophones.