Tashlhiyt Berber is one of three main Berber dialects spoken in Morocco. Tashlhiyt Berber has eight to nine million speakers, and is sufficiently homogeneous for these speakers to communicate without difficulty (Stroomer 2008). Tashlhiyt is well documented in terms of its grammar (Aspinion 1953). In
particular, there are basic phonological descriptions of its phoneme inventory, syllable structure and morphophonological alternations (Dell and Elmedlaoui 2002, and references therein). Moreover, phonetic recordings of particular segmental phenomena are available and have been annotated and analysed (e.g. Ridouane 2008; Ridouane and Fougeron 2011). By contrast, up to recently, its intonation has been regarded as terra incognita, although preliminary studies have been carried out by members of this group (Grice et al. 2011; Röttger et al. 2012).
Tashlhiyt Berber associates H tones to phonologically specified structural positions (vocalic and sonorant nuclei), the selection of a particular tone bearing unit being dependent on a number of interacting factors. One such factor is sentence modality, which not only influences the selection for association of one TBU over another, but also affects the alignment of tones within a TBU. Furthermore, Tashlhiyt may, under certain circumstances, align tones with transitional vocoids, units that cannot have a tone bearing function. The fact that the phonetic detail of alignment and the phonological association function in strikingly similar ways calls for an integrated analysis of both of these levels of tonal placement.