Editing Zulu language (section)

===Prosody===

====Stress====

Stress in Zulu words is mostly predictable and normally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word. It is accompanied by an allophonic lengthening of the vowel. When the final vowel of a word is long due to contraction, it receives the stress instead of the preceding syllable.

Lengthening does not occur on all words in a sentence, however, but only those that are sentence- or phrase-final. Thus, for any word of at least two syllables, there are two different forms, one with penultimate length and one without it, occurring in complementary distribution. In some cases, there are morphemic alternations that occur as a result of word position as well. The remote demonstrative pronouns may appear with the suffix ''-ana'' when sentence-final, but only as ''-ā'' otherwise. Likewise, the recent past tense of verbs ends in ''-ile'' sentence-finally, but is reduced to ''-ē'' medially. Moreover, a falling tone can only occur on a long vowel, so the shortening has effects on tone as well.

Some words, such as ideophones or interjections, can have stress that deviates from the regular pattern.

====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.

====Depressor consonants====

The breathy consonant phonemes in Zulu are [[depressor consonant]]s or depressors for short. Depressor consonants have a lowering effect on pitch, adding a non-phonemic low-tone onset to the normal tone of the syllable. Thus, in syllables with depressor consonants, high tones are realised as rising, and falling tones as rising-then-falling. In both cases, the pitch does not reach as high as in non-depressed syllables. The possible tones on a syllable with a voiceless consonant like ''hla'' are {{IPA|[ɬá ɬâ ɬà]}}, and the possible tones of a breathy consonant syllable, like ''dla'', are {{IPA|[ɮǎ̤ ɮa̤᷈ ɮà̤]}}. A depressor does not affect a syllable that's already low, but it blocks assimilation to a preceding high tone so that the tone of the depressor syllable and any following low-tone syllables stays low.