Cori language
The Cori (Chori) language is a minor Plateau language spoken in a single village in Kaduna State in Nigeria.
| Cori | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Nigeria |
| Region | Kaduna State |
Native speakers | 1,000 (2004)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cry |
| Glottolog | cori1240[2] |
Tone
Cori is known for having six distinct levels of tone, too many to transcribe using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which allows five. However, there are only three underlying tones: 1 (top), 4 (mid), and 6 (bottom), which are all that need to be written for literacy. Most cases of Tone 2 (high) are a result of tone sandhi, with 4 becoming 2 before 1. Tones 3 (mid-high) and 5 (low) can be analysed as contour tones, with underlying /1͡6/ realised as [3] and /2͡6/ realised as [5].
In order to transcribe the surface tones without numerals (which are ambiguous), an extra diacritic is needed, as is common for four-level languages in Central America:
- 1 [ő] (top)
- 2 [ó] (high)
- 3 [o̍] (mid-high)
- 4 [ō] (mid)
- 5 [ò] (low)
- 6 [ȍ] (bottom)
References
- Cori at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Cori". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- Dihoff, Ivan (1976). Aspects of the tonal structure of Chori. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin.