Tommo So is a language spoken in the eastern part of Mali's Mopti Region. It is placed under the Dogon language family, a subfamily of the Niger-Congo language family. There are approximately 60,000 speakers of Tommo So. Of the twelve Dogon languages, it is the second-most common. It is classed as a 6a (vigorous) language under Ethnologue's language status classifications—the language is "used for face-to-face communication by all generations and the situation is sustainable." Children are still acquiring Tommo So as their

first language A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...

. Bambara and

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

(Mali's

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

and

national language A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. There is little consistency in the use of this term. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the te ...

) are common second languages for Tommo So speakers, with the former being common among those that have spent time in other areas of Mali, and the latter being used to communicate in the classroom or with foreigners.

Phonology

Vowels

Tommo So contains 17 vowel

phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

. There are seven basic vowels spanning four vowel heights and three vowel backnesses. Besides the 7 basic vowels, Tommo So's vowel inventory includes their long counterparts and 3

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

long vowels. The placement of vowels in words does not affect their length—long vowels tend to be about 138ms long, and short vowels tend to be about 67 ms long. The nasalized vowels /iːⁿ/ and /uːⁿ/ are present in the language but occur infrequently and irregularly, and are not considered phonemic.

Consonants

Tommo So contains 17 consonants. There are 5

places Place may refer to: Geography * Place (United States Census Bureau), defined as any concentration of population ** Census-designated place, a populated area lacking its own municipal government * "Place", a type of street or road name ** Often ...

and 6

manners of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...

Consonant length In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...

is contrastive—for example, ɛ̀nnɛ́and ɛ̀nɛ́are considered to be different words—the first means 'look for', and the second means 'spend the day'. The consonant inventory includes the alveolo-palatal

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...

ʑ��the consonant �does not appear by itself. There are a few other consonants sounds that occur in consonant speech (such as �and ɕ. However, these sounds occur only in ideophones, and are not considered part of Tommo So's consonant inventory.

Syllabic structure

There are eight syllable types in Tommo So: (C)V, (C)Vː (C)VR, (C)VC, N, NCV, NCVː, and CVV. N represents a nasal consonant, and R represents a

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...

. A (C)VC syllable must be followed by an

onset Onset may refer to: *Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound *Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States **Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal *Interonset interval, ...

identical to this

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. Some examples of these syllable structures are provided below.

Tone

Tone is significant both lexically and grammatically. Tommo So contains two tones, high (H) and low (L). Based on an analysis of recorded words, the distribution and placement of H and L tones seem to be governed by a set of patterns that are relatively unpredictable for nouns, numerals, and adjectives, and predictable for verbs.

Lexical Tone

Almost all syllables have an associated H or L tone, and every stem must contain at least one H tone. Although tones are contrastive, there are very few minimal pairs that are only tonally distinctive. A few examples are listed below.

Grammatical Tone

Tommo So, like other Dogon languages, uses tonal overlays. A stem's tones are overwritten by a pre-determined tone overlay depending on the context in which the stem appears. Verb phrases' tones are replaced based on inflectional

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

, and only affect the verb stem. As an example, main clauses' affirmative imperfect overlay is , and their negative imperfect overlay is . Relative clauses' affirmative imperfect overlay does not change tones, and their negative imperfect overlay is . Given the noun stem 'jɔ̀bɔ́''('run') of the /LH/ tone class, conjugation would result in the following. Noun phrases' tones are replaced based on the relationship between words in the noun phrase, and can affect multiple words. Although verb phrase tonal overlays are strictly defined for all verbs, noun phrase tonal overlays are dependent on the object in the noun phrase being possessed or not.

Morphology

Tommo So is an

agglutinative language An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain ...

. In general, when these morphemes are attached to each other, they retain their original form and meaning within the new word. Tommo So's morphology contains

affixation In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

clitics In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

, and

compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...

Affixation

As an agglutinative language, the affixation of morphemes plays a major role in Tommo So's morphology. Almost all of the language's bound morphemes are used as suffixes—prefixes are only seen in the form of reduplication, when used for deadjectival nominalization. Tommo So contains five verbal derivational suffixes, listed below.

There are some cases in which the 'reversive' suffix ''-ílɛ́'' does not seem to contain a reversive meaning. For example, the word ''yàmá'' means 'be ruined', but the word 'yàm-ílɛ́' means 'ruin.' Some derivational suffixes just happen to carry "no discernable meaning at all." Tommo So does not contain much nominal morphology—the only two meaningful suffix types that attach to nouns are those that implement a human/non-human system and the diminutive suffix ''-ý''. In the case below, ''íí'' is an allomorph of ''-ý.''

Clitics

There are a few

in Tommo So, including a plural marker ''=mbe'' and a definite marker ''=gɛ'' (an example showing both is given below). Clitics are always attached to the end of an entire noun phrase rather than the noun itself.

In general, clitics are always attached to the end of a stem, and never the beginning.

Reduplication

Reduplication is used for different purposes in Tommo So's morphology. The first is deadjectival nominalization, and the second is adjectival distribution.

Deadjectival nominalization

The process of nominalizing an adjective requires for the adjective stem to be reduplicated, either in part or in whole. At minimum, the first syllable is reduplicated. However, in the case of multisyllabic adjectives, up to the entire word can be reduplicated. A tone shift also occurs during this process. Regardless of how much of the original word is duplicated, the resultant noun has the same meaning.

Adjectival distribution

The reduplication of an adjective is used to distribute its meaning across a given number of objects.

Compounding

There are two types of compounding in Tommo So: nominal compounding and adjectival compounding.

Nominal compounding

About a third of the known lexicon of Tommo So consists of nominal compounds, of which most are right-headed. Some examples of nominal compounds are provided below.

Bahuvrihi compounding

Bahuvrihi compounding in Tommo So occurs when a complex noun is created by attaching an adjective to the end of a noun.

Syntax

Basic word order

Tommo So's basic word order is subject-object-verb ( SOV). Examples of this are shown below.

References

Bibliography

* {{Languages of Mali Dogon languages Languages of Mali