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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.
Igbo is the principal native language cluster of the Igbo people, an ethnicity in the Southeastern part of Nigeria.
Zulu, or IsiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken and indigenous to Southern Africa. It is the language of the Zulu people, with about 13.56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The word "KwaZulu-Natal" translates into English as "Home of the Zulu Nation is Natal". Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa, and it is understood by over 50% of its population. It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994.
Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-directional tone. Tone sandhi is a type of sandhi, which refers to fusional changes, and is derived from the Sanskrit word for "joining."
Sango is the primary language spoken in the Central Africa especially the Central African Republic, southern-Chad and Democratic Republic of the Congo. This language is co-official language in Central African Republic It is used as a lingua franca across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988. It also has 1.6 million second language speakers.
Swazi or siSwati is a Bantu language of the Nguni group spoken in Eswatini and South Africa by the Swati people. The number of speakers is estimated to be in the region of 4.7 million including first and second language speakers. The language is taught in Eswatini and some South African schools in Mpumalanga, particularly former KaNgwane areas. Siswati is an official language of Eswatini, and is also one of the twelve official languages of South Africa.
NKo (ߒߞߏ), also spelled N'Ko, is an alphabetic script devised by Solomana Kanté in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa. The term NKo, which means I say in all Manding languages, is also used for the Manding literary standard written in the NKo script.
Sandawe is a language spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. Sandawe's use of click consonants, a rare feature shared with only two other languages of East Africa – Hadza and Dahalo, had been the basis of its classification as a member of the defunct Khoisan family of Southern Africa since Albert Drexel in the 1920s. Recent investigations however suggest that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe family regardless of the validity of Khoisan as a whole. A discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).
The Mandinka language, or Mandingo, is a Mande language spoken by the Mandinka people of Guinea, northern Guinea-Bissau, the Casamance region of Senegal, and in The Gambia where it is one of the principal languages.
The Gusii language is a Bantu language spoken in Kisii and Nyamira counties in Nyanza Kenya, whose headquarters is Kisii Town,. It is spoken natively by 2.2 million people, mostly among the Abagusii. Ekegusii has only two dialects: The Rogoro (upper-side) and Maate (lower-side) dialects. Phonologically, they differ in the articulation of /t/. Most of the variations existing between the two dialects are lexical. The two dialects can refer to the same object or thing using different terms. An example of this is the word for cat. While one dialect calls a cat ekemoni, the other calls it ekebusi . Another illustrating example can be found in the word for sandals. While the Rogoro word for sandals is chisiripasi , the Maate dialect word is chitaratara . Many more lexical differences manifest in the language. The Maate dialect is spoken in Tabaka and Bogirango. Most of the other regions use the Rogoro dialect, which is also the standard dialect of Ekegusii.
Tiv is a Tivoid language spoken in some states in North Central Nigeria, with some speakers in Cameroon. It had over 5.2 million speakers in 2024. The largest population of Tiv speakers are found in Benue state in Nigeria. The language is also widely spoken in some Nigerian states namely, Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa, Cross River, Adamawa, Kaduna, and Abuja. It is by far the largest of the Tivoid languages, a group of languages belonging to the Southern Bantoid languages.
Tonga (Chitonga), also known as Zambezi, is a Bantu language primarily spoken by the Tonga people who live mainly in the Southern province, Lusaka province, Central Province and Western province of Zambia, and in northern Zimbabwe, with a few in northwest Mozambique. The language is also spoken by the Iwe, Toka and Leya people among others, as well as many bilingual Zambians and Zimbabweans. In Zambia Tonga is taught in schools as first language in the whole of Southern Province, Lusaka and Central Provinces.
The Koti language, or Ekoti, is a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique by about 100,000 people. Koti is spoken in the area surrounding Koti Island and is the major language of Angoche, the capital of the district with the same name in the province of Nampula.
Gornate-Olona is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Varese in the Italian region Lombardy, located about 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Milan and about 10 kilometres (6 mi) southeast of Varese. As of 31 December 2015, it had a population of 2,243 and an area of 4.8 square kilometres (1.9 sq mi).
Mbakara is a word in the Annang, Efik and Ibibio languages used for those in the Western world. Rather than be seen as a normative category, it is the description of a relationship between Africans in the West African coast of Calabar and their European counterparts from the West with whom they traded. The name Mbakara has been interpreted by various writers as a shortened form of the phrase Mbaka nkara in Annang and Ibibio meaning "divide and rule". Among those groups, as elsewhere, Westerners came to be identified with colonialism.
The Fwe language, also known as Chifwe, is a Bantu language spoken by the Fwe people in Namibia and Zambia. It is closely related to the Subia language, Chisubia, and is one of several Bantu languages that feature click consonants.
Yulu is a Central Sudanic language spoken by the Yulu people of South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). It has an estimated 7,000–13,000 speakers.
The Anii is a Guan language is spoken in Benin, and central-eastern Togo and central eastern Ghana by Makכ-Makua or Bakכ-Bakua clan. It is part of the geographic group of Ghana Togo Mountain languages of the Kwa branch of Niger–Congo.
Jita is a Bantu language of Tanzania, spoken on the southeastern shore of Lake Victoria/Nyanza and on the island of Ukerewe.
Mbato, also known as Mbatto, Nghlwa, Potu or Gwa, is a Kwa language spoken in Ivory Coast and in Ghana. It is one of two Potou languages, along with Ebrié. The Mbato people primarily live in the La Mé region of Ivory Coast, particularly in the sub-prefecture of Oghlwapo in the Alépé department.
References
- ↑ "Abon". LINGUIST List. Archived from the original on 5 June 2019. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
- ↑ Abon at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ↑ "(PDF) A Robust Language Processor for African Tone Language Systems". ResearchGate. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
