Introduction

Dimasa is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodo-Garo family, spoken by approximately 88,543 people in Assam and Nagaland. Not much is known about the phonology of Dimasa in general, and still less is known of the tonal phonology and phonetics of the language. In this article, we will investigate the tones of the Dimasa language. With the help of instrumental acoustic analysis, we examine the number and types of tones in Dimasa, and the acoustic characteristics that can distinguish among them. We will then examine how tones operate in non-derived disyllables as well as in non-derived monosyllables, and look at the effect of different types of consonants on the pitch of the following vowel. We conclude that Dimasa has three tones – rising/high, level/mid, falling/low, and that both monosyllables and disyllables are lexically marked with only a single tone. We also determine that the effect of consonants on the following vowel extends into 20 per cent of the vowel.

Background

Within the Tibeto-Burman family, the Bodo-Garo group of languages has received considerable interest from the linguistic community, with particular attention paid to the tonal systems; viz. Burling (1959), Joseph and Burling (2001), Halvorsrud (1959), Bhattacharya (1977), Weidert (1987), Baro (2001), Basumatary (2005), Joseph and Burling (2006) etc. However, there are lots of conflicting views regarding tones in these languages. In the literature on Bodo, while Weidert (1987) claims that Bodo has no tones, Bhattacharya (1977) claims that Bodo has four tones.