A Description of the Phonology of the Sandawe Language

This paper is a phonological description of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken in central Tanzania. We begin by discussing the distribution of the consonant and vowel phonemes in the language. Particular attention is given to a comparison of contrastive click accompaniments, which is illustrated by waveform graphs. We then present an analysis of tone in Sandawe, beginning with an account of how surface tone patterns are derived from underlying tones and moving on to consider tone melodies and some phrase and sentence-level tonal phenomena. In the following sections we consider syllable structure and the segmental effects of morphological processes. The paper ends with a brief explanation of the Sandawe orthography.