Mituku (also known as Kinya-Mituku or Metoko) is a

Bantu language The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...

of the

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...

. The Mokpá dialect is distinct.

Tones

It is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

with four tones: high, low, falling and rising.

Downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...

can occur between two high tones or between a high and falling tone. A contour (rising or falling) tone can occur on a vowel if and only if the vowel is the realization of two underlying vowels.

References

Mbole-Enya languages Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo {{Bantu-lang-stub