Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench Reference Blench2006, Childs Reference Childs and Hickey2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639–3: tem, Lewis Reference Lewis2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes on dependent elements. Features determining class membership include number and animacy. Temne also features extension suffixes which alter the valency or the semantic structure of simple verb stems. The basic word order is Subject–Verb–Object.
Temne has a long history of research. Some of the earlier works focusing on Temne and its sounds include Schlenker (Reference Schlenker1864), Sumner (Reference Sumner1922), Scott (Reference Scott1956), Dalby (Reference Dalby1966) and Wilson (Reference Wilson1961, Reference Wilson1968). In addition, Ladefoged (Reference Ladefoged1968, Reference Ladefoged1971) also briefly describes aspects of the sounds of Temne. To the best of our knowledge, the only recent publications discussing the sound system of Temne are Nemer & Mountford (Reference Nemer and Mountford1984), Turay (Reference Turay1989), Yillah (Reference Yillah1992), Kamarah (Reference Kamarah2007), Bai-Sheka (Reference Bai-Sheka2007) and Wilson (Reference Wilson2007).
This description of the sound system of Temne is based on productions from two speakers from different dialect areas. The main speaker, the first author, is a male speaker of the Yoni dialect. The second is a female speaker from the town of Kambia in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone, who speaks the North-Western dialect of Temne. Both speak Temne as their first language and were in their early thirties at the time of the recording. Both speakers had lived in Sierra Leone until their early twenties and currently reside in Canada. The first author translated and produced ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ passage.
Consonants
Temne has nineteen phonemic consonants.
Examples of the consonants in Temne were selected to occur in as similar a context as possible. In this case they precede the same vowel, /e/, where possible. In two instances the consonant precedes /ɛ/ and in three cases /u/ was used to illustrate sounds that occur as part of dialectal variation illustrated in the list at the end of the present section.
Temne has been reported by Ladefoged (Reference Ladefoged1968) as having an apical/laminal distinction. This contrast is presented in this work as a contrastive dental and alveolar place of articulation, which is consistent with Ladefoged's description of these sounds. Ladefoged indicates that the dental apical stop has very little aspiration while the alveolar laminal stop is aspirated or slightly affricated. This observation is confirmed by the acoustic display in Figure 1.
Spectrograms illustrating dental unaspirated stop tham ‘to taste’ (on the left) and the alveolar aspirated/affricated stop tam ‘to announce’ (on the right).
Wilson (Reference Wilson2007) finds the sounds /d/ and /r/ to be in complementary distribution and, in some cases, in free variation. As indicated by Wilson (Reference Wilson2007), groups of speakers vary their choice of /d/ or /r/ in stem-initial position (e.g. /dì/ and /rì/ meaning ‘there’). However, there are environments in our data where this variation is not allowed. For example, the verb ‘to eat’ can only be produced as /dì/ and never as /rì/; Speaker 1 uses /dì/ for both ‘to eat’ and ‘there’. The following minimal pair also would seem to indicate that these are indeed separate phonemes: dada ‘uncombed hair’ and dara ‘palm nut stalk’.
The sets of consonants /t/ vs. /tʃ/, /s/ vs. /ʃ/, and /j/ vs. /w/ are dialectal variants before the front vowels /i e a/. In the following list of examples, the Yoni dialect is contrasted with all the other dialects (Western Konke, Eastern Konke, Sanda, North-Western, and Bombali):
Very little else is known about dialect differences in Temne, a topic deserving further detailed research.
Vowels
Kamarah (Reference Kamarah1994) describes the vowel /a/ as front, /ʌ/ as back and /ə/ as central. However, preliminary acoustic analysis of recordings from the first speaker provide evidence that of the nine vowels in Temne, /i e ɛ/ are front, /ə ʌ a/ are central and /u o ɔ/ are back. The vowel chart illustrates the Temne vocalic system. It presents an idealized distribution of the preliminary F1/F2 vowel distribution plot in Hertz given on the right. Data from this plot were produced by the first speaker and are based on productions of 90 vowels from an earlier elicitation session. Each vowel was measured during a steady state period near the midpoint of the vowel.
In addition to its phonemic status, the vowel /ə/ often appears epenthetically between two consonants to break up a potential consonant cluster. For example, the borrowed word ‘school’ is produced as /səkul/ with an epenthetic schwa. Schwa epenthesis also occurs when consonants are brought together in the morphology, for example /kəl/ ‘to pour’ when combined with the causative/iterative morpheme /-s/ is /kələs/ ‘to pour repeatedly or cause someone to pour’. Additionally, the representation of the phoneme /ʌ/ with the carat symbol is a transcription convention which conforms to earlier usage, representing the central half open vowel. Based on our preliminary acoustic analysis, it may be more accurately described as /ɜ/ or /ɐ/ on the standard IPA chart.
Diphthongs
Early Temne reference grammars, including Schlenker (Reference Schlenker1864), Sumner (Reference Sumner1922), Scott (Reference Scott1956), and Wilson (Reference Wilson1961), describe the diphthongs as forward closing, with a movement from the vowels /e a ʌ u ɔ o/ towards the front close vowel /i/. Following Yillah (Reference Yillah1992), Kamarah (Reference Kamarah1994) and Kanu (Reference Kanu2002), we have adopted the convention of using the palatal approximant symbol /j/ for the latter part of the glide. Thus diphthongs are represented as a vowel–glide sequence /ej aj ʌj uj ɔj oj/.
Tone
As stated earlier, Temne is a tonal language (Wilson Reference Wilson1968, Nemer & Mountford Reference Nemer and Mountford1984). According to Kamarah (Reference Kamarah1994) and Dalby (Reference Dalby1966), Temne has high, low, rising and falling tones. Based on our data and investigation of tone, we have found no indication of contour tones and thus support Wilson (Reference Wilson1968, Reference Wilson2007), who argues for only high and low tones in Temne. Tone fulfils both lexical and grammatical functions in the language. The examples below illustrate words that are lexically contrastive.
Tone is used to make grammatical distinctions such as definiteness and past tense. For example, with nouns belonging to the ɛ- noun class, a distinction between definite and indefinite nouns is based on tone. Definite nouns take a high tone while indefinite nouns take a low tone on the class suffix, as the following examples illustrate:
Downdrift and downstep phenomena also occur in Temne (Dalby Reference Dalby1966, Wilson Reference Wilson1968, Kamarah Reference Kamarah1994). In the case of downdrift, a sequence containing a HLH tone pattern as in the above examples /
-mùná/ ‘the-potatoes’ and /-jòká/ ‘the-cassavas’, where the second high tone is lower than the first high tone and in some cases as low as the preceding low tone. In the case of downstep, a sequence containing a HH tone pattern, as seen in the transcription of the recorded passage below for the word /-f
f/ ‘the-dispute’, where the second tone is lower than the first high tone with no intervening low tone. Downdrift, downstep, and tone are phenomena that deserve greater detailed acoustic analysis in Temne.
Transcription of recorded passage
Temne orthography uses a straightforward phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence. In the orthography the graphemes generally correspond to their IPA counterparts with the following exceptions: 〈
〉 is used for /ʌ/, 〈y〉 is used for /j/, and the digraph 〈th〉 is used for /
/. Tone is not indicated in Temne orthography. A dash is used to distinguish a particle from the root. The dash can be used to distinguish between a diphthong and vowels in hiatus.
Orthographic version
ŋfef thɔrɔŋ yi neyŋ d de sor ɛfɔf t pa ŋa kəbk təbnth. ŋfef thɔrɔŋ ŋ pa ŋ tha bk təbnth. ney sɔ də pa d tha bk təbnth. Ka ŋlɔkɔ ŋa ɛfɔf ɛye, d ukɔth ɔ de der di. ɔkɔth ɔwe ɔ kuflanɛ ruma rɔ won. Ka ŋlɔkɔ ŋe, fef thɔrɔŋ yi neyŋ d ŋ de byt kəpa ɔwe mɔtha gbo yɔ ɔkɔth ɔ bus ruma rɔŋ-e, kɔnɔ tha bk təbnth. Ka ktɔŋ kati, d ŋfef thɔrɔŋ ŋ feŋ ɔlel ɔlel. Kɛrɛ mŋ fɛŋ gbo-e, y ɔkɔth mɔ kuflanɛ ruma rɔŋ rɔ won. Kələpsɔ-i, d ŋfef thɔrɔŋ ŋthɔblɛ. ney d də wɔŋ kbarantha. Pə wonyɛ, k ɔkɔth ɔ bus ruma rɔŋ rɔ ɔwon. Tati-i ŋfef thɔrɔŋ d gbithanɛ kəpa ney r tha bk təbnth.
Broad transcription
Interlinearized version
ABBREVIATIONS
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank G. Tucker Childs and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful discussion of this paper.
