The phonology of Atchan

Abstract

Atchan is a Kwa language spoken by approximately 150,000 people in and around Abidjan in southern Côte d’Ivoire. In this paper, I describe aspects of the phonology of Atchan, including its consonant and vowel inventory, syllable structure, patterns of nasalisation, and lexical and grammatical tone. I provide examples from primary data collected in collaboration with native speakers of Atchan. This article offers the first comprehensive sketch of Atchan phonology in the literature.

A typological survey of the phonological behavior of implosives: Implications for feature theories

“…For example, Bolé-Richard describes the low tone surfacing as 'very low' after depressor consonants, but not other consonants. This pattern has been confirmed in recent work by Katherine Russell (Russell 2023). If implosives lack a [-sonorant] feature in Atchan, we can pick out the class of depressor consonants with the features [-sonorant, +voice].…”

“…The data presented in this section comes from Bole-Richard (1983) and was confirmed by the first author with a native Atchan speaker in Abidjan in Summer 2019. Additional data comes from fieldwork carried out by Katherine Russell and described in Russell (2023). The consonant inventory of Atchan is given in Table 7.…”