Implosives in Bantu A80? The case of Gyeli

Implosive consonants in Bantu A80 languages are widely attested in the litera- ture. The status that specific authors assign to them, however, differ significantly, ranging from mere phonetic contrasts to phonemic status or even absence in cer- tain languages. Given this variety of language analyses, along with a controversy about necessary and sufficient features of implosive sounds, this paper aims at re- assessing the range of implosives and non-implosives within A80 and especially Gyeli (A801). I show that though implosives are expected in Gyeli from previous literature, these sounds are better described as pre-glottalized stops with a rela- tively long prevoicing time. That raises the question whether this analysis might be more appropriate for other A80 languages as well. While this paper cannot pro- vide any conclusive answer on the latter question, it hopes to raise awareness of the methodological problems associated with the present description of A80 im- plosives, encouraging a systematic re-evaluation of the data. It also encourages a discussion on how the general fieldworker should go about describing implosive(- like) sounds.