2025/05/12 by Winfred Mkochi · 1 voice
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Speech and Audio Processing
paper · doi:10.2989/16073614.2024.2421802
openalex publication_date 2025/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
This article explores sources of what appears to be vowel lowering and raising phenomena in CiTonga, a southern Bantu language spoken in Nkhata Bay, a lakeshore district in northern Malawi. The author is a native speaker and the primary source of the data. The central idea in the article is that the vowel lowering and raising in this language follow from a complex interaction of three factors, namely progressive vowel height harmony, vowel reduction, and prosodic phrasing. The root-initial vowel /e/ is responsible, as argued in the article, for lowering the high vowel /i/ to [e], while the root-initial vowel /o/ is responsible for lowering both high vowels /i/ and /u/ to [e] and [o] respectively. Thus, vowel harmony in this language is asymmetric. Vowel reduction, on the other hand, is responsible for the raising of the mid-vowel /e/ to [i]. I was not able to find underlying mid-vowel /o/ in word-final position. Finally, phonological phrasing is responsible for lowering high vowels /u/ and /i/ to [o] and [e], respectively, in utterance-final position.