ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of tone in Bantu languages. It discusses the main representational questions concerning tone in Bantu, i.e., whether L tone is “special” and what the tone-bearing unit is; it surveys major tonal processes found in Bantu languages, such as tone movement and dissimilation; it describes the core tonal properties of nouns, verbs and phrases across a wide range of Bantu languages; and it discusses diachronic developments involving tonal reanalysis.
