Towards a typology of prosodic contact: tonal varieties of Swahili

General Research Fund Award (GRF), 2024/25
Principal investigator: Kofi Yakpo
Amount: 784,271 HKD

Abstract

This project aims to advance our understanding of how tone and stress evolve as languages interact with one another. The focus of the project is Swahili, a Bantu language spoken natively and as a lingua franca throughout East and Central Africa. Swahili has been described as a language that makes use of stress, not tone. By contrast, all other languages native to East and Central Africa employ lexical and grammatical tone.

The project will therefore explore the hypothesis that the prosodic systems of some varieties of Swahili also make use of tone due to interaction with other African languages. In the course of research, the following main questions will be explored. Firstly, what is the nature of the tone systems that may have resulted from the interaction? Secondly, how does the data on Swahili fit into the broader picture of what we already know about the outcomes of contact between tone and stress elsewhere in Africa, in Asia, and in other parts of the world? In order to find answers to these questions, a corpus of different varieties of Swahili will be gathered in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and analysed phonetically and statistically.

The results of this study have the potential to change our understanding of how prosodic systems interact when they come into contact. The resulting theoretical framework could fill gaps in our knowledge of the linguistic features and the social factors that play a role in these interactions