A preliminary phonology of Vale

This paper is a preliminary phonology of Vale, a Sara-Bongo-Bagirmi language in Central African Republic. Vale's consonant system includes implosives, prenasalized plosives, and prenasalized fricatives, but it lacks labial-velar plosives. Robust voiceless fricatives are limited to /s/ and /h/. Vale has five oral and five nasal vowel phonemes. I found no evidence for the presence of ATR vowel harmony. It has two level tones, and I posit five underlying tone melodies: L, H, LH, HL, and HLH. All of these melodies occur on monomorphemic words. The L in the HLH pattern is realized as a floating L which triggers non-automatic downstep, so the HLH pattern surfaces as HꜜH.