Chichewa tones

[4] The accompanying illustration from Myers[5] shows the typical intonation of a declarative statement in Chichewa: The four high tones, marked H on the transcription, come down in a series of steps, a process common in many languages and known as downdrift, automatic downstep, or catathesis.

This rise in pitch is typically heard at any pause in the middle of a sentence, such as here, where it marks the topic: 'a man, he rules women'.

This tonal spread from a penultimate high tone is frequently heard when a verb is immediately followed by its grammatical object.

When a final-tone word such as nyaní comes at the end of a sentence, it is often pronounced as nyăni with a rising tone on the penultimate and the final syllable low.

But if a suffix is added, the stress moves to the new penultimate, and the word is pronounced with a full-height tone on the final: nyaní-yo 'that baboon'.

Similarly the first tone of words ending HLLH can spread to make HHLH: In addition there are a large number of nouns which have no high tone, but which, even when focussed or emphasised, are pronounced with all the syllables low: A tonal accent differs from a stress-accent in languages such as in English in that it always retains the same pitch contour (e.g. high-low, never low-high).

Two pitch levels, high and low, conventionally written H and L, are usually considered to be sufficient to describe the tones of Chichewa.

From 1976 onwards a number of academic articles by Malawian and Western scholars have been published on different aspects of Chichewa tones.

The earliest of these was volume 3 of J.K. Louw's Chichewa: A Practical Course (1987) [1980]; A Learner's Chichewa-English, English-Chichewa Dictionary by Botne and Kulemeka (1991), the monolingual Mtanthauziramawu wa Chinyanja/Chichewa (c.2000) produced by the Centre for Language Studies of the University of Malawi (available online),[20] and the Common Bantu On-Line Chichewa Dictionary (2001) formerly published online by the University of California in Berkeley.

Downdrift does not occur, for example, when a speaker is asking a question,[25] or reciting a list of items with a pause after each one, or sometimes if a word is pronounced on a high pitch for emphasis.

There is also no downdrift in words like wápólísi 'policeman' (derived from wá 'a person of' + polísi 'the police'), where two high tones in the sequence HLH are bridged to make a plateau HHH (see below).

[28] An illustration of peak delay can be seen clearly in the pitch-track of the word anádyetsa 'they fed' reproduced above, here pronounced anádyétsa, in Downing et al. (2004).

Tone doubling is also found when a noun is followed by a demonstrative or possessive pronoun: It sometimes happens that the sequence HLH in Chichewa becomes HHH, making a tonal 'plateau'.

[38] There are also certain tonal tense patterns (such as affirmative patterns 5 and 6 described below) where the two tones are kept separate even when the sequence is HLH: No tonal plateau is possible when the underlying sequence of tones is HLLH, even when by spreading this becomes HHLH: When a word or closely connected phrase ends in HHL or HLHL, there is a tendency in Chichewa for the second H to move to the final syllable of the word.

Just as in English, where in a word like zoo or wood or now the initial voiced consonant has a low pitch compared with the following vowel, the same is true of Chichewa.

[52] An exception is that nouns which at an earlier period had HH (such as nsómba 'fish', from proto-Bantu *cómbá) have changed in Chichewa to HL by Meeussen's rule.

The three nouns díso 'eye', dzíno 'tooth', and líwu 'sound or word' are irregular in that the high tone moves from the prefix to the stem in the plural, making masó, manó, and mawú respectively.

[54] Foreign borrowings also occasionally have this intonation: In isolation these words are usually pronounced bwālō, Chichēwā, etc., ending with two tones of mid height.

The second tone is lower than the first: Adjectives in Chichewa are usually formed with the word á (wá, yá, chá, zá, kwá etc.

[62] The first three syllables in these adjectives are bridged into a plateau: Combined with an infinitive, á and ku- usually merge (except usually in monosyllabic verbs) into a high-toned ó-:[64] Some speakers make a slight dip between the two tones: Combined with a negative infinitive, the adjective has a tone on the penultimate.

Here they are shown with the concords of classes 1 and 2: As with possessives, the high tone of these may shift by bumping after a noun or adjective ending in HL or LH or HH.

The obvious conclusion is that the high tones of verbs are not inherited from an earlier stage of Bantu but have developed independently in Chichewa.

According to Kanerva (1990) and Mchombo (2004), the passive ending -idwa/-edwa also adds a high tone, but this appears to be true only of the Nkhotakota dialect which they describe.

The remote perfect (simple past) tense can be made with -ná- or -dá- (-dá- being preferred in writing:[87] When the aspect-marker -ká- 'go and', or an object-marker such as -mú-, is added, it has a tone.

However, these are almost never found in modern standard Chichewa:[111] The negative pattern of this group is a single tone on the penultimate syllable (or final in a monosyllabic verb).

Mchombo gives the following example:[117] The same intonation patterns can also be found in some types of temporal, conditional, or concessive clause.

When followed by another word, the tone is doubled, making ndílí: The participial tenses with -ku-, -ta-, -sana- and the persistive -kada- also all use the relative clause intonation.

[146] In the subjunctive, the only tone is on the penultimate syllable: As well as the word ndi 'is/are' used for identity (e.g. 'he is a teacher') Chichewa has another verb -li 'am, are, is' used for position or temporary state (e.g. 'he is well', 'he is in Lilongwe').

Occasionally a verb which is otherwise low-toned will acquire a high tone in certain idiomatic usages, e.g. ndapitá 'I'm off' (said on parting), from the normally toneless pita 'go'.

To show that something is very small, or very large, or very distant, a Chichewa-speaker will often raise the pitch of his or her voice considerably, breaking the sequence of downdrift.