Abstract

This talk presents an investigation by into the tone system of Wolam Ngio, a Khiamniungic language spoken by around 6,000 people at the India-Myanmar border. While some work on tone in Khiamniungic languages has been conducted in the past, this is the first account of Wolam, the first detailed account of tone in any Khiamniungic variety, and the first time tonogenesis and residual effects of what may be considered grammatical tone have been described for the language group.

Tone systems are common throughout the languages of eastern Asia, Africa, Central America and New Guinea. They estimated to occur in over half of the world's total languages, but with major typological differences in how such systems operate. How does one go about documenting and describing a tone system in an otherwise undocumented language? Where would one begin in trying to understand how such a system functions and how it developed? How can the underlying tone system inform us of other closely related languages for which tone occurs in a completely different manner?

This talk will cover aspects such as eliciting tonally-useful linguistic data while undertaking documentary fieldwork and the difficulties therein, properly normalising acoustic pitch data from different speakers with the appropriate mathematical methods, as well as how one may determine what is phonemically significant in distinguishing tonemes to better determine the tonemic inventory. Orthographic conventions for community-facing language resources will also be addressed, as will some of the software tools useful for the purposes of investigating tone.