Phonetic and Phonological Effects of Depressor Consonants in Malawian CiTonga

Abstract

In this paper we show that certain consonants have the effect of depressing the tone on adjacent vowels in Malawian CiTonga, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Nkhata Bay. We argue that some of these effects are phonological, changing High vowels to Low. In other cases the effect is not categorical, but gradient, as certain consonants have a greater lowering effect than others on the tone of the adjacent vowel. For these cases we propose the effect is phonetic overall. Still, we demonstrate that in these latter cases where the lowering effect is most pronounced, there are near-neutralization effects, which in some cases can lead to neutralization and homophony in the judgment of native speakers. We make some general typological observations, comparing the set of depressor consonants in CiTonga to other Bantu languages.

Keywords

• CiTonga
• Bantu
• tone
• depressor consonants
• neutralization