Editing Zulu language (section)

====Tone====

Like almost all other [[Bantu languages|Bantu]] and other [[African languages]], Zulu is [[tonal Languages|tonal]]. There are three main ''tonemes'': low, high and falling. Zulu is conventionally written without any indication of tone, but tone can be distinctive in Zulu. For example, the words "priest" and "teacher" are both spelt ''umfundisi'', but they are pronounced with different tones: {{IPA|/úm̩fúndisi/}} for the "priest" meaning, and {{IPA|/úm̩fundísi/}} for the "teacher" meaning.

In principle, every syllable can be pronounced with either a high or a low tone. However, low tone does not behave the same as the other two, as high tones can "spread" into low-toned syllables while the reverse does not occur. A low tone is therefore better described as the ''absence'' of any toneme; it is a kind of default tone that is overridden by high or falling tones. The falling tone is a sequence of high-low and occurs only on long vowels. The penultimate syllable can also bear a falling tone when it is long due to the word's position in the phrase. However, when it shortens, the falling tone becomes disallowed in that position.{{clarify|reason=What happens to it?|date=December 2016}}

In principle, every [[morpheme]] has an inherent underlying tone pattern which does not change regardless of where it appears in a word. However, like most other Bantu languages, Zulu has [[word tone]], meaning that the pattern of tones acts more like a template to assign tones to individual syllables, rather than a direct representation of the pronounced tones themselves. Consequently, the relationship between underlying tone patterns and the tones that are pronounced can be quite complex. Underlying high tones tend to surface rightward from the syllables where they are underlyingly present, especially in longer words.