Genitive Construction in Àhàn and Àyèré

Àhàn and Àyèré are two endangered languages spoken respectively in Nigeria. This paper describes the process of genitive construction in the two languages showing how close they are to some Benue – Congo languages in the derivation of genitive. Findings show that genitive marker in both Àhàn and Àyèré is / ólí / as found in some Benue-Congo languages such as Yorùbá, Igede, Èbìrà and Ukaan. The paper further reports that Àyèré has another marker /óní/ that appears to perform the function of deriving genitive ,however the marker, along with the nominal prefix /a/, derive a form that has the semantic coding of “a person who does a particular thing”.