Aspects of Gbagyi Tonology

Tone has overtime proven to be one of the complex but interesting suprasegmental feature in African (tone) languages, and motivated by this fact, this paper is determined to account for the tone system of Gbagyi. The study devises the acoustic instrumental technique to analyse the data which were primarily obtained from some selected native speakers of Gbagyi Nge variety of Gbagyi language spoken in Abuja Municipal Area Council FCT, Abuja in North Central Nigeria. Findings from this research show that contrary to the position in the existing literature on Gbagyi tone which argues for three register tones and two combinatory tones forming contours, there are actually four register and two contour tones in this language. Furthermore, this paper shows that tone may play roles far beyond the phonological domains in Gbagyi since certain tonal patterns which are impermissible in the language are observed to occur only to play some grammatical roles.