Conclusions

variations in the pitch of the glottis to make lexical and grammatical meaning. In tone languages there are three level tones:

the high tone marked ´, the low tone marked ` and the mid tone

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marked -. Usually for convenience, the mid tone is usually left unmarked. There are also contour tones.

Tones play a significant role in languages where they are attested. Important as tones are in making lexical and syntactic distinctions, not many people, including linguists, like to mark tones because they are difficult to mark in writing. All first language speakers of tone languages know intuitively how to mark

tones in speech, but not all know how to mark them in writing, except they have the training in tone marking.

Tone marking is part of the teaching you have to give to your

students learning any of the three languages as a second a language. You must teach your students how tones are marked in the second language. Tones are significant in second language teaching and must be taught to:

1) aid the pronunciation and oral communication in the second language;

2) make meaning distinctions and disambiguate any word with multiple meanings, and

3) use tones as criteria to build minimal pairs in tone languages and to isolate idiophones.

You must remember that tones are easily confused and/taken for minimal pairs. You must teach your students to recognise and mark tones. Tones are not particularly pleasant to mark, even by linguists and language teachers. But as for you, you must teach them and encourage your students to tone mark in order to assist

them to perceive, recognise and produce them orally and mark them in writing, especially, to disambiguate idiophones in writing. As you have read, although all first language speakers are able to mark tones in speech, they still have to be taught how to mark

tones in their first language. Native speakers and non-native speakers alike have to be taught tone marking in writing. The music notes d. r. m are used to represent tones this way:

• The musical note d: is used to denote low tone this way /`/ as in dòdò, àkàrà (Yorùbá).

• The musical note r: is used to mark the mid tone.

Incidentally, the mid tone is regularly unmarked. So, whenever a vowel is unmarked, you should understand or interpret it as a mid tone.

• The musical note m: is used to represent the high tone as in /!/ as in omi (Yorùbá).

Reading relevant and related passages as well as the use of rhymes

and songs are some of the ways tones can be taught and practised.

The difficulty involved in tone is not the one-tone or monotone words but in polytonal words or polysyllabic words. Polytonal and polysyllabic words are difficult in terms of pronunciation because

of the associated pitch or rhythm variations; but that is where the beauty of pronunciation of Nigerian words lies, the same way intonations beautify intonation languages.

One additional reason why you must tone mark is the ambiguity inherent in idiophones in writing. In speech, idiophones are easily recognised in context; written in isolation, they are not. This will be shown for you in the examples below. They are taken from a

number of Nigerian languages. In Yorùbá, for example, you will need appropriate tone marking to know which of the many possibilities

the sequence of the segments /i/, /gb/ and /a/ really refers to.

Otherwise, it will remain ambiguous:

1. igbá, a calabash, mid-low;

2. ìgbà, time or period, low-low;

3. ìgbá, the locust bean pod, low-high, 4. igba, two hundred, mid-mid.

The sequence ö+w+ö without tone marking is equally riddled with ambiguity. Tone marked, it could have any of five possible meanings:

1. ôwô, a town in OÃdó State of Nigeria;

2. öwõ low-high (hand);

3. öwô mid-low (broom), 4. ôwõ low-high (unit).

5.

In Ìgbò, we have the following examples:

1. óké male 2. òké rat 3. ókè boundary 4. orí head

5. òrí shear butter (Abíõdún, 2011, pp. 53 & 54).

6. wááríí, a bad odour

7. ‟wáárìì, „one of a pair of shoes‟ 8. súúmááa, „hair on a man‟s head‟ 9. d r „type of game‟

10. dár „red cap‟ (Àmfàní, 2011, p. 144).

Tones play lexico-semantic functions. i.e., they help to distinguish meaning in items with identical segmental phonemes as

in the examples above. Tones also play syntactic or grammatical roles. For example:

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Gíáá nèè „it is a house.‟ Audú néé. It is Audú.

Yáárínyàà céé. She is a girl Kúúráá cèè. It is a hyena

She is a girl (Àmfàní, 2011, p. 145).

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Igbo examples are illustrated using Ìgbò words igwe and aka and akwa. Notice that the meaning of each of the phone sequences change as the tones change.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

ígwè, iron

ìgwè, plenty/many ígwé, sky/heaven áká, hand

àkà, tick ákà, beads àkwà, bed ákwà, clothes

ákwá, cry (Iloene, 2011, p. 182).

Tones are lexically and semantically important. “They are used to separate the meaning of words which are otherwise identical in

their segmental composition,” (Iloene, 2011, p. 182). The teacher of Nigerian languages must teach tone and tone marking to students of Nigerian languages. Minimal pairing may be very useful in teaching second language tones and segmental phonemes. This must be

done in a lively context through intensive practice using minimal pairing, sentences in dialogues, conversations, reading of relevant passages and so.