Much theoretical work has been done on the tonal structure of languages in the Bantu family. However, most of these studies are not supported by physical measurements, or even a consistent model for mapping from linguistic constructs to such measurements. As a first step towards addressing this deficiency, we report on initial measurements regarding the relationship between fundamental frequency and linguistic tone in isiZulu. After choosing a suitable algorithm for pitch extraction, we have correlated a number of linguistically assigned tone values with measured values for fundamental frequency. These measurements indicate a fairly complex relationship between tone and pitch, and suggest that the commonly observed falling' tone in isiZulu may be a context-specific realization of the high tone.
Cite as: Govender, N., Barnard, E., Davel, M. (2005) Fundamental frequency and tone in isizulu: initial experiments. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 1417-1420, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-506
@inproceedings{govender05_interspeech,
author={Natasha Govender and Etienne Barnard and Marelie Davel},
title={{Fundamental frequency and tone in isizulu: initial experiments}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={1417--1420},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-506}
}