Once I found out that it’s going to cost me just as much to take four classes as it would to take five, I enrolled in Introduction to African Linguistics. The class promises to be a snoozefest as a linguistics primer, but the fun part is that we have to adopt a language, study it and report on it over the course of the semester. I asked the instructor what language has a tone system with lots of word-level phonology—I want to see some crazy awesome phonology—and he suggested Akan, a family of languages spoken in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
The above data comes from the Twi language, and I would like to call attention to the (apparent) minimal pair /dʑa/ ‘leave behind’ and /dʑɥa/ ‘peel’. The initial consonant on both of these words is a voiced palatal affricate (compare to English “j” in judge), but the second is differentiated by the labiopalatal approximate (so imagine rounding your lips and bringing your tongue closer to your hard palate while making the “j” sound). As far as I can tell (I have yet to view a real grammar of the language), these are contrastive phonemes—which is really cool! Imagine if lip-rounding made a difference in English, imagine having two “ch” and two “j” sounds, all four as distinct as /p/, /b/, /t/ and /d/—that’d be neat!
(Also, props to the careful reader who notices the nasal assimilation and coalescence/gemination in the second column.)
