When marking tone reduces fluency: An orthography experiment in Cameroon

by Steven Bird

Originally published as:   Bird, Steven. 1999. "When marking tone reduces fluency: An orthography experiment in Cameroon." In Language and Speech 42(1) 83-115. © 1999 Language and Speech. Used by permission.

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Summary

Should an alphabetic orthography for a tone language include tone marks? Opinion and practice are divided along three lines: zero marking, phonemic marking, and various reduced marking schemes.

This paper examines the success of phonemic tone marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language which uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. A critical review of other experimental work on African tone orthography lays the groundwork for the experiment, and contributes to the establishment of a uniform experimental paradigm. The testing procedure and results should provide insight into the effect of tone marking on reading fluency that will be helpful to linguists working with tone languages.

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