Tee language

Tẹẹ
Native to	Nigeria
Region	Rivers State
Native speakers	310,000 (2006)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Cross River Ogoni East Ogoni Tẹẹ
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tkq
Glottolog	teee1242[2]

Tẹẹ, or Tai, is the language of the Tai tribe of the Ogoni nation of Nigeria. It is to a limited degree mutually intelligible with Khana, the main Ogoni language, but its speakers consider it to be a separate language.

Phonology

The Tẹẹ ([tɛ̀ː]) sound system is typical of an Ogoni language and identical to that of Khana, with the exception of four or five voiceless sonorants not found in that language. The voiceless w is also found in other Ogoni languages, and voiceless j and l are also found in other languages of Nigeria.

Tẹẹ has three tones, high, mid, and low. There are seven oral vowels, /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/, and five nasal vowels, /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/. All may occur long or short. The consonants are as follows:

Tẹẹ consonants

		Bilabial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar		Labial- velar
			central	lateral		plain	lab.
Plosive	voiceless	p	t			k	kʷ	k͡p
	voiced	b	d			ɡ	ɡʷ	ɡ͡b
Fricative	voiceless		s
	voiced		z
Nasal	voiceless	(m̥)	n̥
	voiced	m	n		ɲ		ŋʷ
Approximant	voiceless			l̥	ȷ̊		w̥
	voiced		ɹ	l	j		w

A glottal stop [ʔ] appears before any otherwise vowel-initial stem. The alveolar consonants are apical.

Tẹẹ includes a rather unusual series of voiceless sonorants. The voiceless palatal /ȷ̊/ sounds rather like the voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but is not as noisy (that is, there is not much random-frequency noise in its sound spectrum). Similarly, /l̥/ is a voiceless approximant, not a voiceless fricative *[ɬ]. The voiceless bilabial nasal, /m̥/, is only known to occur in one word, /àm̥èː/ (an unidentified abdominal organ), and then only for some speakers. All of the voiceless sonorants are actually voiced during the second half of their enunciation. That is, /n̥/ is pronounced [n̥͡n] However, they are considerably shorter than their voiced homologues, and hence cannot be considered /hC/ sequences with an otherwise unattested consonant */h/.

References

1. Tẹẹ at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Tee". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

• Ladefoged, Peter (October 1995). "Voiceless approximants in Tee". Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages III (UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics) 91: 85–88.