Syllable Weight in African Languages

This is an abridged version of a paper originally published over forty years ago (Newman 1972). It is being reprinted here because of its significance in the history of phonological theory and its contribution to African linguistics. At a time when the role of the syllable in linguistics was being ignored, this paper demonstrated the importance of the syllable for linguistic description and proposed a new variable that needed to be taken into account, namely ‘syllable weight’, a term first intro