Forthcoming: African tone phenomena

Keith L. Snider (ed), Virginia Beavon-Ham (ed)

Synopsis

A vital resource for emerging and seasoned linguists alike, African Tone Phenomena serves as a handbook and inspiration for rigorous research into under-documented African tone systems. The volume features 18 peer-reviewed chapters authored by leading linguists. Each chapter prioritizes clear description, employing theoretical terminology only as needed to illuminate the phenomena being discussed.

Following an introduction and a tribute, the volume is divided into two parts. Part 1 comprises seven chapters: six of these explore common tone phenomena such as tone spreading, downstep, and grammatical tone, alongside less common phenomena such as consonant-tone interaction and tonal polarity. The seventh chapter describes how linguistic tone influences vocal music and relates to surrogate languages like those of talking drums and xylophones. Part 2 has ten chapters devoted to tone phenomena found in specific language families and regions (e.g., Northwestern Bantu, Benue-Congo, and Mande).

Chapters

  • African tone phenomena in focus
    Virginia Beavon-Ham, Keith L. Snider
  • Tone spread and shift
    Joshua A. G. Smolders
  • Grammatical tone in African languages
    Nicholas Rolle, Lee Bickmore
  • Tonal downdrift and downstep in African languages
    Keith L. Snider
  • Floating tones
    Nicholas Rolle, Larry M. Hyman, Florian Lionnet
  • Consonant-tone interaction
    Virginia Beavon-Ham, Mary Pearce
  • Tone polarity
    Douglas Pulleyblank
  • Tone and music in Africa
    Laura McPherson
  • Tone in Cushitic languages
    Christopher R. Green
  • Tone in Chadic languages
    James Roberts
  • Tone in Nilo-Saharan
    Mirella L. Blum
  • Tone systems in the Bantoid languages
    Roger Blench
  • Lexical and non-lexical tone in Mambiloid
    Bruce Connell
  • Tone in Grassfields Bantu languages
    Cameron Hamm, Rachel Robinson, Pius W. Akumbu
  • Tonal systems in Benue-Congo and West Chadic A3 in Central Nigeria
    Roger Blench
  • Tone in Mande languages
    Maria Konoshenko
  • Tone in Kru languages
    Katherine R. Russell
  • Tone in Northwestern Bantu
    Nadine Grimm

Biographies

Keith L. Snider

Keith L. Snider is a Senior Linguistics Consultant with SIL Global and Affiliate Professor of Linguistics at Trinity Western University. Drawing on many years of original field research on Chumburung (Ghana) and other tone languages, he developed and taught a graduate course on tone analysis for over 20 years and led numerous international tone workshops. Prior publications include book chapters and journal articles, as well as his major publications, The Geometry and Features of Tone and Tone Analysis for Field Linguists (also translated into French).

Virginia Beavon-Ham

Virginia Beavon-Ham is a Linguistics Consultant with SIL Global and has worked on linguistic research, training, and administration in the countries of Benin and Cameroon. She has taught linguistics courses in the French-language offerings of i-DELTA, a SIL training program for language-related study. She has a Ph.D. from Leiden University, where her research was on tone in Saxwe, a Gbe language. Her conference presentations, published articles, and interests are focused on various elements of the prosody of African languages.

cover

Published

August 20, 2026
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Contemporary African Linguistics

Print ISSN

2511-7726
Cite as
Snider, Keith L. & Beavon-Ham, Virginia (eds.). Forthcoming. African tone phenomena. (Contemporary African Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2026 Keith L. Snider, Virginia Beavon-Ham; Joshua A. G. Smolders, Nicholas Rolle, Larry M. Hyman, Lee Bickmore, Florian Lionnet, Mary Pearce, Douglas Pulleyblank, Laura McPherson, Christopher R. Green, James Roberts, Mirella L. Blum, Roger Blench, Bruce Connell, Cameron Hamm, Rachel Robinson, Pius W. Akumbu, Maria Konoshenko, Katherine R. Russell, Nadine Grimm

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.