Tone and syllable structure in Jàbà

Abstract

Jàbà is a tone language. It is spoken precisely in Kaduna and some parts of Kwara states of Nigeria. The focus of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it studies tone in Jàbà. Then, it looks into the structure of Jàbà syllables. Data were collected from educated multilingual native speakers of Jàbà who are also literate in the language. The paper, then, observed that tone is phonemic and varies in the associative construction. It also found out that three level tones exist in the language namely: high, mid and low. The mid tone is unmarked. However, Jàbà permits consonant clusters at the onset; it employs both open and closed syllables.