Editing Dida language (section)

===Tones===
Dida uses tone as a grammatical device. Morpho-tonology plays a greater role in verb and pronominal paradigms than it does in nouns, and perhaps because of this, Dida verbs utilize a simpler tone system than nouns do: Noun roots have four lexically contrastive tones, subject pronouns have three, and verb roots have just two [[word tone]]s.

There are three level tones in Abou Dida: {{smallcaps|high}} {{IPA|/˥/}}, {{smallcaps|mid}} {{IPA|/˧/}}, and {{smallcaps|low}} {{IPA|/˨/}}, with {{smallcaps|mid}} about twice as common as the other two. Speaker intuition hears six [[contour tone]]s:  rising {{IPA|/˧˥/, /˨˧/}} and falling {{IPA|/˥˧/, /˥˩/, /˧˩/, /˨˩/}}. (The falling tones only reach {{smallcaps|bottom}} register at the end of a [[prosodic unit]]; otherwise the low falling tone {{IPA|/˨˩/}} is realized as a simple low tone.) However, some of these only occur in morphologically complex words, such as [[perfective aspect|perfective]] verbs.

Monosyllabic nouns contrast four tones: {{smallcaps|high, mid, low,}} and {{smallcaps|mid-falling}}: {{IPA|/dʒeˤ˥/}} "egg", {{IPA|/dʒeˤ˧/}} "leopard", {{IPA|/dʒeˤ˩/}} "buffalo", {{IPA|/dʒeˤ˧˩/}} "arrow", with {{smallcaps|high}} and {{smallcaps|mid}} being the most frequent.