In response to requests I have often got as to how one approaches a tone language, I present a personal view of the three stages involved, starting from scratch and arriving at an analysis: Stage I: Determining the tonal contrasts and their approximate phonetic allotones. Stage II: Discovering any tonal alternations ("morphotonemics").…

Examines the success of phonemic tone-marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language that uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants from a variety of different age groups and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography, were tested on location in the Western…