| The phonetic description of Ibibio tones (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| Introduction Ibibio belongs to the Lower-Cross language group of the Benue-Congo branch of the NigerCongo language family (Williamson 1989) and it is spoken in Akwa Ibom State in the SouthEastern part of Nigeria. Like most Benue-Congo languages, Ibibio is tonal and is an example of a terraced level tone language (Welmers 1973). This study is an on-going investigation into the phonetics of Ibibio tone. Research into Ibibio language is relatively recent and is mainly in the areas of syntax (Kaufman 1968, Essien 1985, 1986, 1990, etc), Phonology (Boys 1976, Umoh 1985, Urua 1987, 1990, Imoh 1988), comparative work (Utip 1989), and experimental work on the consonants (Garnes 1984, Connell 1991). Tone has received very little attention apart from accounts of tone performing both lexical and grammatical functions. This work is an attempt to fill the experimental gap with respect to Ibibio tones. 2 Ibibio Tones Phonologically, two contrastive tones occur in Ibibio, Hi | |||||||||||||||
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