Mituku (also known as Kinya-Mituku or Metoko) is a Bantu language of the

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

. The Mokpá dialect is distinct.

Tones

It is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

with four tones: high, low, falling and rising.

Downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...

can occur between two high tones or between a high and falling tone. A contour (rising or falling) tone can occur on a vowel if and only if the vowel is the realization of two underlying vowels.

References

Mbole-Enya languages Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo {{Bantu-lang-stub