Yemba: A Tonal Analysis
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Abstract
Yemba, or Bamiléké Dschang, is a Bamiléké language in the Bantu language family spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in Cameroon and even more globally. It has a complex and rich tone system that is the subject of debate even today. This work seeks to perform the first computational analysis on this language by using Steven Bird's 2003 dataset containing thousands of utterances. This analysis supports existing scholarship suggesting that tone serves as a tense marker in Yemba. By focusing on the present, immediate past, and proximate future—all of which are string-identical and so must be differentiated by their tone—this research posits a tense register tone. The concept of a register tone in Yemba was put forward by previous work and shifts the pitch standard of the sentence up or down, thus keeping the relative pitches of utterances the same but adjusting the absolute pitch, creating tonal assimilation. Additionally, analysis of F0 frequency graphs reveals that future tense corresponds to a high register toneme, while past tense is a low register toneme. However, the present tense is an oddball with a register tonal polarity morpheme that first dissimilates from the surrounding context, then changes the pitch standard. This is just one possible solution and opens the door for future, more in-depth research on this language, especially with new datasets being made available.