Tenyidie: Another African Tone System in Southeast Asia?

Abstract

In this paper, I compare Tenyidie (Angami) with two neighbouring languages Kuki-Thadou and Mizo, which are also Tibeto-Burman, by looking at the similarities and dissimilarities in the tonal aspects, with the knowledge that Kuki-Thadou is known to be an outlier in the language map by showing more of an African tone aspect (Hyman 2010) [1]. While Mizo shows up to be a very typical Tibeto-Burman tone language (Sreenivasan 2015) [2], Tenyidie lies somewhere in between Mizo and Kuki-Thadou in its similarities to African tonal characteristics. The properties of ‘contour tone system’ in Pike (1948) [3] fit more for the Mizo contours and those for ‘register tone system’ fit more for Thadou and Tenyidie. However, while the post-lexical phenomena of ‘downstep’ and ‘downdrift’ are present in Thadou, they are absent in both Mizo and Tenyidie.