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Wobé is known for claims that it has the largest number of tones (fourteen) of any language in the world. However, this has not been confirmed by other researchers, many of whom believe that some of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects, though the Wèè languages in general do have extraordinarily large tone systems.
The fourteen posited tones are:
IPA
˥
˦
˧
˨
˧˥
˧˦
˨˥
˨˦
˨˧
˥˩
˦˩
˧˩
˨˩
˨˧˩
B&L tone numbers
1
2
3
4
31
32
41
42
43
15
25
35
45
435
Newman adjustment
0
1
2
3
20
21
30
31
32
04
14
24
34
324
Asian convention
5
4
3
2
35
34
25
24
23
51
41
31
21
231
References
Wobé at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ Bearth, Thomas; Link, Christa (1980). "The tone puzzle of Wobe". Studies in African Linguistics. 11 (2): 147–207.
Newman, Paul (1986). "Contour Tones in Grebo". In van der Hulst, Harry; Bogers, Koen; Mous, Marten (eds.). The Phonological Representation of Suprasegmentals. Publications in African Languages and Linguistics (Book 4). De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 190–191 (notes 12 and 14).
Newman believes Singler is a valuable counterweight to Bearth & Link, but does not accept all his criticism; he accept the Wobe 43 toneme, for example, but believes it should be analyzed as /32/ (all tones being off by 1 compared to related dialects).
