Tone in the Makonde dialects Chimahuta

Abstract

This paper expands the descriptive study of tone in the Makonde dialects, started in Odden [1990], by studying the Chimahuta dialect. Like the Chimaraba dialect and a number of closely related Bantu languages of Southern Tanzania, Chimahuta verbs lack lexical tone properties, and all tones appearing on the surface in verbs arise as a consequence of rules of tone insertion, docking, spreading, and deletion.

Keywords

• tone
• Makonde
• Chimahuta
• Chimaraba
• docking
• spreading