EXPECTATIONS FROM THE DICTIONARY OF ILAJE DIALECT - S. OLA AJIMISAN

A certain Ilaje brother asked me why I designated Ilaje as a dialect and even went ahead to cast colonial slur and profiling on the designation. I told him that he could see Ilaje as a language if and only if he meant that Ilaje is not a sub-linguistic entity of the larger Yoruba language. That is by the way. Ilaje is a DIALECT of the Yoruba Language. Here are some of the things you should expect as you anticipate the birth of the revolutionary and innovative DICTIONARY OF ILAJE DIALECT:

The dictionary states the word class/part of speech of each of the words, using either abbreviations of full spellings as in Ugba/re-re(Noun) two hundred or 200; Ugba/re-mi/(Noun) calabash; Ugba/do-do/(Noun) time, period; Ugba/do-mi/(Noun) garden egg; ugba/re-do/(Noun) climbing rope.

The dictionary also uses elementary tone-marking method as seen above to avoid the use suprasegmental tones in order to avoid confusion and help those who are not familiar with assent or "ami ohun" in Yoruba.

The dictionary boasts of more than 1200 entries.

The dictionary makes use of most of the lexical items in sentences to show context-based meaning.

It also indicates meaning in case of polysemy and homophones/homonyms.

Note: the work may not be perfect. However, what you cannot take away from the project is that it is Ilaje-centric and Ilaje-morphic. Alexander Pope asserted that since there is no perfect writer, there'll never be a perfect work. What is important is that the book is bringing something new to the table. My belief is that "those who seek to write exceedingly perfect books are those who will never write any book because, as each passes and snowballs into weeks, they will wake to imperfections that will make the books unworthy of publication and public scrutiny". I'm not afraid trying new things because I'm not afraid of making mistakes and coming under the intense jackhammers of both constructive and destructive critics and critiques.