 In principle, every morpheme has an inherent underlying tone pattern which does not change regardless of where it appears in a word.However, like most other Bantu languages, Zulu has word tone, meaning that the pattern of tones acts more like a template to assign tones to individual syllables, rather than a direct representation of the pronounced tones themselves.Consequently, the relationship between underlying tone patterns and the tones that are actually pronounced can be quite complex.