Basaá [ɓàs
ː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis Reference Lewis2009). Basaá is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classified as A43 (Guthrie Reference Guthrie1967–71, A43a in Maho Reference Maho2009). The ISO code of Basaá is bas (Lewis Reference Lewis2009).
Early records of the Basaá language appear at the beginning of the 20th century (Rosenhuber Reference Rosenhuber1908, Schürle Reference Schürle1912, Scholaster Reference Scholaster1914). Recent studies on Basaá phonology include topics such as vowel raising (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1996, Mutaka & Bitjaa Kody Reference Mutaka and Kody2000), characteristics of consonants (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1994, Buckley Reference Buckley1997, Solé Reference Solé, Vigário, Frota and Freitas2009: 224) and tone (Bôt Ba Njock Reference Bôt Ba Njock1964, Teil-Dautrey Reference Teil-Dautrey1992, Makasso Reference Makasso, Marlo, Adams, Morrison and Purvis2012). For a comprehensive overview of Basaá phonology, see Bôt Ba Njock (Reference Bôt Ba Njock1962) and Hyman (Reference Hyman, Nurse and Phillipson2003). The Basaá language has also contributed to studies of historical phonology (Janssens Reference Janssens1982, Reference Janssens1986; Teil-Dautrey Reference Teil-Dautrey1991). Other literature on Basaá includes dictionaries (Schürle Reference Schürle1912, Lemb & de Gastines Reference Lemb and de Gastines1973) as well as morphological studies (Bôt Ba Njock Reference Bôt Ba Njock1970, Voorhoeve Reference Voorhoeve and Bouquiaux1980, Dimmendaal Reference Dimmendaal1988, Bitjaa Kody Reference Bitjaa Kody1990, Hyman Reference Hyman2000). However, a phonetic description of Basaá represents a gap in this literature, which this Illustration aims to fill.
Examples in this paper come from two sources: Hyman (Reference Hyman, Nurse and Phillipson2003), and the first author, who is a native speaker of the Basaá language. The accompanying recordings for this article are of a male Basaá native speaker in his thirties, recorded on a Marantz PMD661 Field Recorder using a head-worn microphone (Shure WH-30 XLR).
Consonants
The phonetic chart of Basaá consonants shows that the voiceless plosives do not have voiced counterparts, except for the labialized velar. Among the voiceless fricatives, all but /s/ and
/χ/ have voiced counterparts. Prenasalized stops and nasals occur at all places of articulation, as do fricatives. The velar nasal /ŋ/ appears as an initial as a prefix before vowel-initial roots, as in [
-àn
] ‘cl1-chief’. Words exemplifying each of the consonants will be found in the ‘Phonotactics’ section below.
Plosives and fricatives in Basaá are in complementary distribution. Voiceless stops /p
t
k/Footnote
1
occur only word-initially. In intervocalic position, the stops undergo lenition to /β ɾ ɣ/, and before non-sonorants or in pre-pausal position the lenited sounds /ɸ
χ/ are voiceless. The voiced fricatives /β ɣ/ and the voiced tap /ɾ/ can appear word-initially only when they begin a grammatical morpheme (a prefix) such as [βì-tám
b] ‘cl8-shoe’. In the pre-pausal position only, /s/ and /h/ are in free variation, as in [móm-óh] ~ [móm-ós] ‘to console’.
Basaá also has taps, approximants and palato-alveolar affricates. The voiced alveolar plosive /d/ only occurs as part of a prenasalized stop /n
d/, and so do other voiced plosives. Other Basaá sources (Lemb & de Gastines Reference Lemb and de Gastines1973) employ an orthographic ‹d› in the position of the tap /ɾ/. Loanwords such as ‘dollar’, however, are produced by Basaá speakers as [dólà], with a /d/. The voiceless tap /
/ is an uncommon sound, but appears in pre-pausal position.
The implosive /ɓ/ occurs in the initial position of a morpheme as in the words [ɓàs] ‘salt (cl9)’, [ɓ
:ŋg
] ‘children (cl2)’ and [ɓòròl] ‘to start’. The implosive can also occur word-internally when it is morpheme-initial, as in [kàɾ-ɓà] ‘to pride oneself’, when preceded by a sonorant. After a vowel, the implosive is realized as a fricative /β/. The following illustrate:
Vowels
Basaá has seven phonetic vowels /i e ɛ u o ɔ a/, and each vowel may be short or long. All short vowels can be followed by a sonorant or an obstruent in monosyllabic words. Long vowels, however, cannot be followed by any consonant in a syllable. The contrast in the phonological quantity in Basaá is based on differences in vowel length without additional qualitative differences.
Vowel raising
Basaá has two major vowel processes: vowel syncope and vowel raising. The vowel raising occurs when a verbal extension such as an applicative is added to a verb stem. Low vowels in the stem become mid vowels, and mid vowels become high vowels. High vowels do not undergo any changes. For a phonological analysis of this vowel raising, see Schmidt (Reference Schmidt1996) and Mutaka & Bitjaa Kody (Reference Mutaka and Kody2000).
Tone
Basaá has two register tones: high and low, and two contour tones: rising and falling. Minimal pairs with register tones over two syllables (HL or LH sequences) can also be found. Each row in the following table represents a minimal tonal contrast in Basaá.
Basaá also has a grammatical downstep process triggered by an L tone between H tones. The present tense is marked with a nasal H and a floating L tone: the H tone in the verb [
] ‘to eat’ is downstepped in the present tense [à ń↓
] ‘she eats’.
Syllable structure
The syllable template of Basaá is (C)V(C) or (C)Vː. Onsets are not required in Basaá and codas are not prohibited. Syllables cannot have coda consonants when the nucleus is a long vowel.
Syllabic nasals
Basaá has syllabic nasals that are homorganic with the place of articulation of the following consonant. The syllabic nasals occur as class prefixes in nouns or as tense morphemes in verbs. In terms of tone, syllabic nasals are assigned an L tone. When a noun begins with a palato-alveolar sound, the syllabic nasal is realized with /n/. A vowel-initial noun has a syllabic nasal prefix that is a velar nasal /ŋ/.
Phonotactics
Basaá consonants demonstrate unusual phonotactics with respect to their occurrence within a prosodic stem (a combination of a root and suffixes, but not including prefixes).Footnote
2
Most consonants in the chart can appear in stem-initial position. Voiceless fricatives /ɸ
χ/, however, cannot be the first consonant in a stem. The set of consonants allowed in a prosodic word substantially decreases in positions located further away from the left edge of the prosodic stem. The first position of a prosodic stem (C1) allows the largest contrast, but subsequent positions (C2, C3, C4) only allow a limited set of consonants. When a Basaá word has four consonants, the maximum number in a prosodic stem, the last consonant is one of /n ɣ χ h/; if the fourth consonant is stem-final, then it can only be /χ/. A prosodic stem can have maximally four consonants (Hyman Reference Hyman, Nurse and Phillipson2003). The following word list below is based on this phonotactic restriction in Basaá. High tone is marked with an acute accent and low tone is marked with a grave accent. The tilde (~) means free variation. When a noun does not have an overt noun class prefix, the noun class is indicated in parentheses. The bolded Cn indicates the position of the consonants illustrated in each list.
Transcribed passage
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. We also thank Will Bennett, Fatima Hamlaoui and Jeremy Perkins for commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript.
