‘Geminate’ consonants in Owere dialect of Igbo Angela Ụ. N. Nwankwere, Cecilia A. Eme and Greg O Obiamalu, Gemination in the Igbo language has been shown to be a phonetic phenomenon which occurs as a result of vowel elision between two identical consonants in rapid speech. However, investigations into other languages seem to suggest that consonant gemination could be a phonological phenomenon. This paper investigates the Owere dialect (OD) of Igbo with respect to gemination. Employing a descriptive approach, the study discovers that many consonants become realized as geminates in the normal flowing speech of the native speakers, basically as a result of the elision of a high vowel in between two identical consonants. Since it has become the normal way of speaking except for emphasis among the Owere dialect users, one may conclude that consonant geminate formation is ongoing in OD. We present in the paper instances were these ‘geminates’ could contrast with non-geminates using minimal pairs and near minimal pairs. Keywords: consonants, gemination, vowel elision, Owere Dialect, minimal pairs 1. Introduction Consonant gemination is the phenomenon in language where a consonant in a morpheme is doubled in the course of speech. This results in two adjacent consonants within a morpheme being identical. Consonant cluster on the other hand, is when two unidentical consonants occur adjacent to each other in tautosyllabic structure. Such identical consonants or geminates are attested to be phonemic in some languages like Italian, e.g. notte /nɔtte/ ‘night’ (cf. Crystal, 2003). In some other languages, gemination may not be attested at all, or where it occurs it is a phonetic event. Eme and Nwankwere (2012) show that in Standard Igbo, the length of certain vowels or syllabic nasals could be made to become longer as a phonetic, rather than a phonological event; geminates were not found. It was in the course of our collecting the relevant linguistic data for our study of phonetic lengthening of sounds in the Standard Igbo dialect that we coincidentally ran into some Owere data that seem to reflect phonemic gemination in this Igbo dialect. In that work, (Eme and Nwankwere, 2012) they said, In the course of our data collection for this paper, some of our informants gave some examples using their dialect. Before we discarded the dialectal forms as not being relevant to our present research, we discovered that sound lengthening in the Owere dialect of Igbo could result from gemination caused by the deletion of an intervening vowel. A vowel occurring between two consonants is deleted in fast or spontaneous speech in certain words of the language. This chance discovery spurred us into carrying out a further investigation of the dialect, as we recommended; hence this paper sets out to investigate gemination in the Owere dialect of Igbo. 2