The sounds of Hausa (2)

What you probably discovered is that the stressed syllables have higher pitch than the unstressed ones. Pitch is not the only factor in stress, though:

• Stressed English syllables also are longer (in time) and have more distinctive vowel sounds, while unstressed English ones tend to be short (in time) or even disappear
• Unstressed syllables tend and to have indistinct or “neutral” vowel sounds. That is, unstressed vowels all tend to sound alike. For example, the first vowels of “tomorrow,” “democracy,” “tamale,” and “timidity” sound nearly the same when spoken quickly by most Americans. That's one reason it's so hard to learn to spell English!

This diagram below shows a partial spectrogram of the words íncline and inclíne. It's pretty but you don't need to understand it … skip it if you want! Notice that the stressed syllables tend to be longer in time (horizontal axis) and higher in pitch (vertical axis). [The final syllables have a falling pattern, probably because they’re isolated and pronounced as if in a list, where tone falls on each word.]

By now you may be wondering what on earth all this has to do with Hausa! Well, tone (pitch) and length (timing) are notorious stumbling blocks for English speakers learning Hausa, so it pays to learn a little about how they work in English so we can carry over that knowledge to help us learn Hausa.

Here are the words “permit” and “suspect” with the tone diagrammed the same way we will be using for Hausa. Click on the sound icons to hear the corresponding pronunciations.

Exercise: As mentioned earlier, tone is also important in English (and probably every language) to express emotion, distinguish statements from questions, focus attention on certain things, and so on. Try sketching the tone contour for these sentences:

• I want to learn Hausa?
• I want to learn Hausa.
• I'm so happy for you!
• I'm so happy for you. (sarcastic)