Generational tone change in Northern Bemba

While the fundamentals of the tonology of the Bemba variety spoken in and around Zambia’s Northern Province in the mid‑twentieth century are well documented by multiple renowned Bantu scholars, no comparable study exists describing the tone of today’s Modern Northern Bemba speakers, some 70 years later. This study attempts to fill that gap by comparing Classic Northern Bemba and Modern Northern Bemba with respect to the three core and fundamental tonal phenomena witnessed in both varieties: unbounded High tone spreading, bounded High tone spreading, and the effects of the OCP on those spreading processes. We find that while the unbounded spreading process has remained largely unchanged, both bounded spreading and the effects of the OCP have changed in significant ways. We provide a detailed description of Modern Northern Bemba tonology based on extensive elicitations with three Northern Bemba speakers. We provide a hypothesis on how these diachronic tone changes might have developed, and also compare the Modern Northern Bemba tonal patterns to those described for Modern Copperbelt Bemba.