Lilias E. Aemsteong in her article ‘The phonetic structure of Somali’ has shown that there is a correlation in this dialect of Somali between tone patterns and grammatical gender in certain types of Nouns. Moreover, at many points in her article she implies by her tone markings that there is also a correlation between other grammatical categories and tone patterns. She states, for example, that ‘plurals of both masculine and feminine nouns are pronounced with the mid-level tones in all syllables … exceptions are the feminine words … ending in in the singular …‘.