The tone system of the Luanyjang dialect of Dinka

Abstract

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of tone in the Luanyjang variety of Dinka, a Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan. We show that LuanyjangDinka has four tonemes, High (H), Low (L), Rising (LH) and Falling (HL). We also describe how underlying tone sequences are often substantially modified in utterances by a number of context-sensitive phonological processes such as dissimilatory lowering of High tones. Given our standard autosegmental description, the phonological categories and processes we posit are broadly familiar from other African languages. However, our analysis requires a typologically less usual understanding of (1) the surface phonetic categories of tone -in particular, what we call "Low" toneme is realized under some conditions as a fairly steep fall; and (2) the relation between the tonal phonology and the quantity system -in particular, we show that each morpheme is underlyingly associated with one and only one toneme, regardless of vowel length. We 1. We are very grateful to our colleague and reference speaker Caguor Adong Manyang. The exploratory sessions with him led us to our initial hypotheses, and he assisted with data collection in Khartoum. In addition, he provided some of the background information on Luanyjang summarised in Section 1.2. We thank our speakers, in particular Caguor and the other three main speakers: Acuil Malou Choth, Gum Dak Mabior, and Makol Jongkuc Athian. We are indebted to the Institute of African and Asian Studies (University of Khartoum), and in particular to its director, Prof. Al-Amin Abu-Manga, for hospitality at his institute. two anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback. We gratefully acknowledge their input.

Luanyjang Dinka

“…It should not come as a surprise, then, that the vowel system is reduced here, from seven to six phonemes -/"/ does not occur as a short vowel. Further details on this centralisation phenomenon can be found in Remijsen & Gilley (2008). As seen from the examples in (10), and also from those in (5), the vowel length distinction has both a lexical and a morphological function; that is there are short stems and long stems, and each of these can appear in a short grade and in long grade.…”

“…We could conceive of this vowel length distinction affecting the association of tones, with more complex tone patterns occurring in syllables (2b), the end of the target syllable is marked by a dot. From Remijsen & Ladd (2008).…”

On the distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology: Evidence from Dinka

“…Consequently we took great care to be sure that the forms we report are correct, putting words in different sentence contexts and carrying out instrumental acoustic measurements where necessary, and we are confident that the data can be considered reliable. As noted above, the dialect under study is Luanyjang Dinka, the sound system of which is familiar to us from several studies carried out in conjunction with the work reported here (Remijsen & Gilley 2008, Remijsen & Ladd 2008, Remijsen & Manyang 2009). The data are based on the speech of the third author, but have been checked for consistency with other speakers in Khartoum; for only ten nouns out of the 400 was there any variability.…”

“…Dinka is of particular phonological interest because of its rich suprasegmental system, which includes independent distinctions of tone, vowel length, and voice quality. The dialect represented here (Luanyjang, part of the Rek dialect cluster) has four tonemes (Remijsen & Ladd 2008), three degrees of vowel length (Remijsen & Gilley 2008), and a two-way distinction of voice quality (breathy vs. modal or creaky) (Remijsen & Manyang 2009); the facts about other dialects (many of which are essentially undocumented) differ in detail but are broadly similar.…”

“…This is not an entirely trivial task, in part because of the phonetic nature of the distinctions involved. The three-way length distinction can be difficult to hear in isolation; one of the tonal distinctions is neutralized or nearly neutralized in citation form (Remijsen & Ladd 2008); there are allophonic interactions of voice quality and vowel quality (Remijsen & Manyang 2009); and in the still-developing orthography the suprasegmental distinctions are represented inadequately or not at all. Consequently we took great care to be sure that the forms we report are correct, putting words in different sentence contexts and carrying out instrumental acoustic measurements where necessary, and we are confident that the data can be considered reliable.…”