Meeussen's rule is a special case of
tone reduction in
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
T ...
. The tonal alternation it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent High tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the
Belgian Bantu specialist
(1912–1978). In
phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
terms, the phenomenon can be seen as a special case of the
Obligatory Contour Principle.
The term "Meeussen's Rule" (the spelling with a capital R is more common) first appeared in a paper by John Goldsmith in 1981. It is based on an observation made by Meeussen in his 1963 article on the Tonga verb stating that "in a sequence of determinants, only the first is treated as a determinant". It was John Goldsmith who reformulated this as the rule HH > HL (or, as he expressed it, H → L / H
) which later became well known as Meeussen's Rule.
Meeussen's rule is one of a number of processes in Bantu languages by which a series of consecutive high tones is avoided. These processes result in a less tonal, more accentual character in Bantu tone systems, ending finally in a situation in which there tends to be only one tone per word or morpheme.
Examples
Here are some illustrations of the phenomenon in
Kirundi
Kirundi, also known as Rundi, is a Bantu language spoken by some 9 million people in Burundi and adjacent parts of Rwanda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, as well as in Kenya. It is the official language of Burundi. Kir ...
(examples adapted from Philippson 1998).
In verb forms
* na-rá-zi-báriira (I-
PAST-them.
CL10-to sew) 'I was sewing them' (''them'' refers to a
class 10 plural)
* na-rá-bariira (I-
PAST-to sew) 'I was sewing'
In the first sentence, both the tense marker ''rá'' and the verb form ''báriira'' (to sew) carry a high tone, signified by the
acute accent<