Tones

There are four tones in Rakal affixes as well as 'toneless' in the root morpheme. You can see them in the image to the right. The IPA symbols for the tones are, , and. Tone is distinctive only in affixes as we need suprasegmental features to give meaning to the shorter combining forms of words.

Rules

 * The rising and falling tones affect polysyllabic affixes, following many strict rules.
 * The high and low tones affect monosyllabic affixes, following the same rules as below (where rising ≈ high and falling ≈ low).
 * Normal stress occurs on the final high tone syllable in a word; this includes the second syllable in a rising tone and the first syllable in a falling tone. i.e. if a word has more than one high tone, stress will be only on the final one.
 * A low tone syllable is never stressed. If there is no high syllable in the word, the final non-low syllable is stressed, including in the rare case of a word with no affixes.
 * 1) All 2-syllable inflectional endings (noun case endings, verb endings, etc) have a rising tone.
 * 2) All 2-syllable content affixes (that is: words used as an affix or part of a compound, dependent affixes e.g.  Mega-) have a falling tone.
 * Affixes with more than two syllables are the opposite to the 3 rules above: longer words as part of a compound take a rising tone on the final two syllables, etc. The high tone syllable is always stressed.