Language Survival, Popular Literacy, and Tone Marking

Previously nonliterary indigenous languages are disappearing quickly. We argue that popular literacy gives those languages a chance for survival. Popular literacy requires economically successful publishing industries that produce economically accessible reading materials ) books, newspapers, comic books ) and an orthography that speakers find easy to use when reading and writing. Evidence from an experiment carried out with speakers of Kom, a language of Cameroon, suggests that tone marking makes written sentences harder to perceive, harder to say, and harder to say correctly. Comparative research using the methodology described here should help us answer important questions, like whether or not these effects vary with the number of tones in a language, or with the linguistic function of tones.