Phonetics of intonation in South African Bantu languages

Abstract

Much is already known about the prosodic systems of the indigenous South African languages from descriptions and analyses in the existing literature. All of the existing work has been carried out in the field of African studies or formal linguistics. In order to be able to implement the generalisations obtained into computational models in speech processing, the existing sources and results must be made accessible to researchers in these areas. In the opposite direction, the modelling of Bantu intonation in speech processing shows the need for more quantitative data. The present article presents a review of durational and pitch-related tonal aspects relating to intonation in South African Bantu languages. Its aim is, on the one hand, to make the results of Africanist and linguistic studies accessible to research in speech processing, laying a foundation on which work in the speech-processing branch of Human Language Technologies can be based. On the other hand, by pointing out gaps in our knowledge, it wants to draw attention to the fact that more quantitative research is needed in order to advance our knowledge also in the theoretical linguistic field.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2008, 26(2): 235–254