Inventory of consonants

The phonetic inventory of consonantal segments of standard Setswana could be described and classified in terms of the following distinctions: (a) the place of articulation; (b) the manner of articulation; (c) the position of the vocal cords; and (d) the position of the velum or soft palate (DALL, 1999; Snyman, 1991).

The most common terms describing places of articulation are bilabial (articulation involving both lips); labio-dental (articulation involving the upper teeth and the lower lip); dental (articulation in which the tip of the tongue is positioned behind the teeth); alveolar (articulation in which the tip or blade of the tongue is positioned against the alveolar ridge); palato-alveolar (articulation in which the blade or middle of the tongue is positioned between the alveolar ridge and the palatal area); palatal (articulation in which the middle of the tongue is positioned against the hard palate); velar (articulation in which the back of the tongue is positioned against the soft palate); uvular (articulation in which the back of the tongue is positioned against the uvular area); glottal (articulation in which the two vocal cords may be tightly closed or widely opened); and latero-alveolar (articulation in which the tip of the tongue is positioned against the alveolar ridge but the airstream is allowed to escape by the sides) (DALL, 1999).

Labial:

• pala ‘goal post’,
• phala ‘impala’,
• bona ‘see’,
• fola ‘heal’,
• motho ‘person’,
• wame ‘mine’

Apical:

• tala ‘raw’,
• thata ‘hard’,
• -disa ‘look after’,
• noka ‘river’,
• -rema ‘chop’

Alveolateral:

• -tlala ‘hunger’,
• -tlhala ‘divorce’,
• -lala ‘spend the night’

Laminoalveolar:

• tsala ‘friend’,
• -tshaba ‘fear’,
• -sala ‘remain’

Palatal:

• ntša ‘dog’,
• tšhaba ‘nation’,
• -ja ‘eat’,
• ša ‘new’,
• -nyala ‘marry’,
• -ya ‘go’

Velar:

• kala ‘branch’,
• khai ‘cloth’,
• -ngala ‘protest’,
• -wa ‘fall’

Uvular:

• kgala ‘dry’,
• -gama ‘milk’

Laryngeal:

• -huma ‘be rich’,
• hela ‘only’,
• lehihi ‘darkness’,
• hapa ‘make neat’

The most common terms used to describe modes of articulation are plosives (when articulation involves blockage of the airstream from the lungs followed by a sudden opening of relevant speech organs causing an explosive sound); affricatives (when articulation involves blockage of the airstream from the lungs and its gradual release through the relevant speech organ with friction); fricatives (when articulation involves constriction of airstream from the lungs and its gradual release with some friction or hissing sound); nasals (when articulation involves blockage of the airstream from the lungs at some place in the mouth while allowing some air to escape through the nose); and sonorants (when articulation involves allowing a relatively free air passage through the mouth or through the nose) (DALL, 1999 ).

Unaspirated unvoiced occlusive or affricatives:

• pula ‘rain’,
• tona ‘big’,
• -tlala ‘filled up’,
• -tsaya ‘-take’,
• letšatša ‘side’,
• kima ‘fat’

Aspirated unvoiced occlusive or affricatives:

• phoko ‘he-goat’,
• thobo ‘harvest’,
• -tlhola ‘check on someone’,
• tshaba ‘fear’,
• tšhaka ‘sword’,
• khumo ‘wealth’,
• kgomo ‘cow’

Voiced occlusive:

• -bala ‘count’,
• -dira ‘do’,
• -ja ‘eat’

Unvoiced plosives:

• pala ‘not able’,
• tala ‘green’/ ‘raw’,
• kala ‘branch’

Fricatives (unvoiced):

• -fa ‘give’,
• -sala ‘remain’,
• -ša ‘burn’,
• -gata ‘step on’,
• -huma ‘be rich’

Nasals:

• mala ‘intestines’,
• naga ‘land’,
• -nyala ‘marry’,
• -ngala ‘sulk’/ ‘protest’

Approximants:

• -wa ‘fall’,
• -lapa ‘get tired’,
• -ya ‘go’

Vibrants (trill):

• -raga ‘kick’

Articulation of sounds in which the position of the vocal cords is taken into consideration is either voiceless or voiced. Sounds produced when the vocal cords are in an open position, and therefore not vibrating to make audible sounds, are known as voiceless. On the contrary, sounds that are produced when the vocal cords are in a closed position, and therefore vibrating when the airstream passes through them, are known as voiced.

NB: This table strictly uses the IPA conventions and it is important to keep in mind that these conventions have the inconvenience of using digraphs that make us think of consonantal articulated sequences where we should recognise simple articulations (for example, ‘tɬ’ is an affricate with lateral release and not a sequence ‘t + ɬ’)

Some of these realisations have variants which can be regarded as substitutes without any contextual conditioning. This is essentially true for /f/ (whose variant is /ɸ/), /b/ (whose variant is /β/) and /d/ (whose variant is /ɾ/). The coexistence of these variants could be explained by dialectal variations and/or phonetic changes which are still developing. Each time, the realisation retained in this inventory and for the classification is the one that predominates amongst young speakers of standard Setswana.

Recognising order of uvular sounds

According to the IPA conventions, <qh> represent a uvular occlusive (and not a click, as it is often the case in most of the conventions used to transcribe Bantu languages of Southern Africa). Previous studies on Setswana wrongly described this consonant as an affricate velar and represented it phonetically as [kχh] (Snyman, 1991: 740. The consonant is indeed an affricate (which should be transcribed as [qχh], but palatograms show that there is a big difference in terms of the place of articulation between /kh/ and /qh/ (whilst <kh> and <k> have the same place of articulation) (Creissels et al., 1997: 10).

For the fricative /χ/, we do not have experimental data as decisive as the palato-grammes we have on the occlusive. Nevertheless, there is a relation between /χ/ and /qh/ (particularly when it comes to how the alternation of consonants functions) which brings us to consider this fricative as a uvular and not as a velar.

Ejective character of unvoiced and unaspirated occlusive

The above presentation of consonant articulations overlooks the fact that unvoiced plosives or affricatives have free variations of realisations which are more or less ejective. In Setswana, a noticeable ejective pronunciation of these consonants characterises a carefully worked-out diction (Creissels et al., 1997: 10). An experimental phonetic analysis of ejectives by Duran et al. (2017) found that the use of ejectives in Setswana have a sociological characterisation dimension of occurrence.

The consonants inventory above does not take into account consonants such as [v] and [z] that may appear due to contact with other languages (English, Afrikaans, Sotho) but which might be considered to have not been integrated into standard Setswana given that other consonants are usually used in their place (for example b is normally used in place of v in borrowed words and s is substituted for z).

Clicks

No clicks appear on this inventory. However, if in Setswana clicks have undoubtedly a very marginal impact, their presence cannot be ignored as compared to languages such as English, as Snyman (1991: 41) provides some in very few but idiomatic words. This is probably due to the fact that Setswana is surrounded by languages (some of which are genetically closely related to Setswana) in which clicks are completely integrated to their consonant system (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996: 2).

In Setswana, and this is probably the case for all the languages, clicks are evidenced at the level of interjections. But they can also be found in a few lexemes involved in sentence construction.

• Apical click | is evidenced in the adjectival base [-ŋ́|ɛŋ́|ɛ] ‘miniscule’
• Lateral click || is evidenced in some verbal bases, such as [ŋ́||aŋ́||abetsa] ‘handle with care’

Snyman (1991: 41) provides the following examples:

Practical linguistic transcription means the transcription which, while considering phonological analysis data, is principally concerned with allowing notation of phrases in view of other aspects of linguistic analysis (syntax in particular). From this perspective, the objective is to reveal in the simplest way possible the stable elements in the realisation of a phrase and to ignore as far as possible things which are more or less accidental (which for example depend on the speed of the debit). For different reasons, this objective can in fact lead to different decisions from those resulting from a simple phonological transcription of a recorded corpus.

Regarding consonants, there is no problem in sticking to phonetic symbols for the practical linguistic transcription of Setswana. This means that this transcription only differs from the phonological transcription at the level of the realisation of the phoneme /D/, for which each allophone is represented by a different symbol.

This is the solution found in the Setswana orthography, except that the letter representing a given phoneme does not always coincide with the symbol recommended by the IPA. The differences can be noted for the following consonants: (comparing IPA and Standard Orthography).

Chebanne, A. M., Creissels, D. & Nkhwa, H. W. (1997) Tonal morphology of the Setswana verb. München: Lincom.

Duran, D., Bruni, J., Dogil, G. & Roux, J. C., (2017) The social life of Setswana ejectives. INTERSPEECH.  pp. 3787-3791.

Ladefoged, P. & Maddieson, I. (1996) The Sounds of the world’s Languages. London: Blackwell.

Snyman, J. W. (1991) An Introduction to Tswana Phonetics. Cape Town: Marius Lubbe Publishers.