"Weakening" in "Bala-Guerive Luri" Dialect: Optimality Theory

The purpose of this paper is to examine the most frequent phonological process of Bala-Guerive Luri dialect, the "weakening", within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The paper is a descriptive-analytical study and data are collected through the research field. Ten hours of useful data through interviews are collected from four speakers at various ages and transcribed based on the IPA International Phonetic Alphabet. The cause of the occurrence of "weakening" in "Optimality Theory" is phonetic stimulus in order to fulfill the least effort principle in speech articulation. The phonetic stimulus can be formulated in the form of constraint LAZY.