Tonal Merger in Medumba (Bamileke) Nouns-gctid91178

[Mani Kongo]

Tonal Merger in Medumba (Bamileke) Nouns
Kathryn Franich, Catherine O'Connor, and Jonathan Barnes
Boston University

"Medumba is spoken by about 210,000 people in southwestern Cameroon (Ethnologue 2010). The language is classified as 'Bantoid' due to the fact that it shares characteristics with Bantu languages, including some trace of a noun class system, but has lost a great deal of the trademark noun class agreement morphology that Bantu languages possess (Hyman & Voeltz 1971). Like other Grassfields languages and most of the Niger-Congo language family, Medumba is a tone language. The present study focuses on data collected in Cameroon in 2010 from two major communities of Medumba speakers around the greater Bangangté area. In eliciting data from a number of speakers of different ages, it became apparent that there was a certain amount of variation in the way that participants were using tone. One environment where this variation is particularly evident is in polar questions. In (1) we see the same two target questions pronounced by two different speakers."
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