Cilungu Phonology

Only a handful of Bantu languages have been completely described phonologically. This volume brings to the forefront Cilungu, spoken in the northeastern part of Zambia's Northern Province and on the southeast shore of Lake Rukwa in Tanzania.

The product of over 15 years of fieldwork, here is a comprehensive description and analysis of the phonology of a language whose tonology is extremely complex, necessitating no fewer than 44 separate tone rules that interact with more than 20 segmental processes. While a number of these processes could be characterized as purely phonological, many have interesting and intricate morphological and syntactic conditioning, all of which is formally analyzed in a generative autosegmental framework.

Along with a focus on Cilungu's phonology, this book also details much of its morphology. The nominal morphology includes descriptions of locatives, diminutives, augmentatives, deverbal nouns, and copulatives. The verbal morphology is comparatively rich, having 26 single-word tense/aspects and over 30 compound ones.

As the diversity of spoken languages continues to taper in Africa, this work presents a valuable study of a multifaceted language with several unique elements that might otherwise be lost for future analysis and reference.

Lee Bickmore is associate professor in the department of Anthropology and its Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Albany.

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9/1/2007