Toro-tegu Dogon

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The Toro language, or Tɔrɔ tegu (“Mountain speech”), is a Dogon language spoken in Mali. About 2,900 people spoke it in 1998. It is closest to Jamsay tegu, the prestige variety of Dogon, but speakers say they are not closely related and understand little of it. They understand none of the Dogon languages on the nearby escarpment or plateau. A researcher named Hochstetler reported that Toro-tegu speakers have difficulty understanding Tomo kan, a western Plains Dogon language.

Toro-tegu has two tones: high and low. Each word has a tone pattern, and every word’s pattern must include at least one high tone; a word cannot be all low. The tone pattern of a word can be changed by inflection or syntax. Some words have patterns like HLH or LHL; for example gɔːn˧˦˨ (griot with war tomtoms) or kaː˦˨nu˦ (monkey).

For human nouns, number is shown by suffixes. For basic CV-stem words, the singular suffix is -r̃ú. For longer stems, the singular suffix is -nú or -ń. The plural suffix for humans is -mú or -ḿ, regardless of stem length.