Tone (linguistics)
Encyclopedia
Tone is the use of pitch
in language
to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect
words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation
, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phoneme
s are sometimes called tonemes.
In the most widely-spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour) and pitch range (or register). Most syllables carry their own tone and many words are differentiated solely by tone. Moreover, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese
that did have morphological
significance. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages
, however, tones are distinguished by their relative level, words are longer, there are fewer minimal tone pairs
, and a single tone may be carried by the entire word, rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.
Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali
, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese
, fewer than half of the words have drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent
, since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, and whether a coherent definition is even possible.
are tonal, notably excepting Swahili
in the East, and Wolof
and Fulani
in the West. The Chadic
, Omotic
, and to some extent Cushitic
branches of Afroasiatic are tonal—the Omotic languages heavily so—though their sister families of Semitic
, Berber
, and Egyptian
are not.
There are numerous tonal languages in East Asia
and South East Asia, including all the Chinese languages (though some such as Shanghainese
are only marginally tonal), Vietnamese
, Thai
, and Lao
. Some East Asian languages, such as Burmese
, Korean
, and Japanese
have simpler tone systems, which are sometimes called 'register
' or 'pitch accent
' systems. However, some languages in the region are not tonal at all, including Mongolian
, Khmer
, and Malay
. Of the Tibetan languages, Central Tibetan
(including the dialect of the capital Lhasa
) and Amdo Tibetan
are tonal, while Khams Tibetan
and Ladakhi
are not.
Along with Lahnda
and Western Pahari languages, Punjabi
is unusual among modern Indo-European languages for being a tonal language.
Some of the native languages of North and South America are tonal, notably many of the Athabaskan languages
of Alaska
and the American Southwest
(including Navajo
), and especially the Oto-Manguean languages
of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages
, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec (with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek
, and one dialect of Tzotzil
have developed simple tone systems.
In Europe, Norwegian
, Swedish
, Latvian
, Lithuanian
, Serbo-Croatian
, some dialects of Slovene, and Limburgish have simple tone systems generally characterized as pitch accent
. Other Indo-European
tonal languages, spoken in the Indian subcontinent
, are Punjabi
, Lahanda
, Rabinian and Western Pahari.
Languages that are tonal include:
The vast majority of Austronesian languages
are non-tonal, but a small number, for example Ma'ya (which also has lexical stress) have developed tone, and also the Tsat language
has developed tone probably as a result of areal linguistic effects and contact with Chinese
, Hlai
/Li
, and the other tonal languages of Hainan. No tonal language has been reported from Australia
. In some cases it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. For example, the Ket language
has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, as having four tones by others, but by some as having no tone at all. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on the researcher's interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation
(creaky, murmured or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, in which case Burmese would not be phonemically
tonal, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone, in which case it would be considered tonal. Something similar appears to be the case with Ket.
The most thoroughly tonal language is the 19th-century constructed language
Solresol
, which consists of only tone.
to convey prosody
and pragmatics
, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs exist between syllables with the same segmental features but different tones.
Here is a minimal tone set from Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, here transcribed by diacritics over the vowels:
These tones combine with a syllable such as "ma" to produce different words. A minimal set based on "ma" are, in pinyin transcription,
These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence,
A well-known tongue-twister
in the Thai language is:
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.
Most Chinese languages use contour tone systems, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour
), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages, on the other hand, have register tone systems, where the distinguishing feature is the relative difference between the pitches, such as high, mid, or low, rather than their shapes. In many register tone systems there is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine register and contour tones, such as many Kru languages
, where nouns are distinguished by contour tones and verbs by register. Others, such as Yoruba
, have phonetic contours, but these can easily be analysed as sequences of register tones, with for example sequences of high–low /áà/ becoming falling [âː], and sequences of low–high /àá/ becoming rising [ǎː].
Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi
, for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones.
Lexical tones more complex than dipping (falling–rising) or peaking (rising–falling) are quite rare, perhaps nonexistent, though prosody may produce such effects. However, the Old Xiang
dialect of Qiyang
is reported to have two "double contour" lexical tones, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high falling – low falling and low falling – high falling: ˦˨˧˨ and ˨˩˦˨ (4232 and 2142).
combined with tone in a single phonological system. Burmese
, for example, is a register language, where differences in pitch are so intertwined with vowel phonation that neither can be considered without the other.
may be lower than that of a low tone at the beginning of the unit, because of the universal tendency (in both tonal and non-tonal languages) for pitch to decrease with time in a process called downdrift
.
Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones; the effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced
rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing
.
Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after the original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called floating tone
s.
, Thai
, and to some extent the Kru languages
, each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese
, the Scandinavian languages, and many Bantu languages
, the contour of each tone operates at the word level. That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3 × 3 × 3 = 27) than a monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent
are word-tone languages.
Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example, a number of Mandarin suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable:
After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid-register tone the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: the contour remains the same (˨˩˦) whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words, the tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive.
may have one or two syllables specified for tone, with the rest of the word taking a default tone. Such languages differ in which tone is marked and which is the default. In Navajo
, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, while marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani
, however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone. There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables, whereas in Russian
, stressed syllables have a lower pitch.
. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms, rather than in the grammar, though some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone. (In Old Chinese
, tones may have grammatical functions.) However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages
, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems reminiscent of East Asia, but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood
, person
, and polarity
, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between 'you went' and 'I won't go'. In colloquial Yoruba
, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may assimilate
to each other, and consonants elide
, so that much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "talking drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling
the tones of speech.
) is found below:
Several variations are found. In many three-tone languages, it is common to mark High and Low tone as indicated above, but to omit marking of the Mid tone, e.g., má (High), ma (Mid), mà (Low). Similarly, in some two-tone languages, only one tone is marked explicitly.
With more complex tonal systems, such as in the Kru
and Omotic languages
, it is usual to indicate tone with numbers, with 1 for HIGH and 4 or 5 for LOW in Kru, but 1 for LOW and 5 for HIGH in Omotic. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.
). For instance, Standard Chinese
has four lexically contrastive tones, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones. Syllables can sometimes be toneless and are described as having a neutral tone, typically indicated by omitting tone markings. Chinese dialects are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories ping 'level', shang 'rising', qu 'exiting', ru 'entering', based on the traditional analysis of Middle Chinese
(see Four tones
); note that these are not at all the same as the four tones of modern standard Mandarin. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called yin and yang. Syllables carrying the ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in all Chinese dialects, so that ru is not a tonal category in the sense used by Western linguistics, but rather a category of syllable structures. Chinese phonologists perceived these checked syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. During the period of Middle Chinese, when the tonal categories were established, the shang and qu tones also had characteristic final obstruents with concomitant tonic differences, whereas syllables bearing the ping tone ended in a simple sonorant. An alternate to using the Chinese category names is to assign to each category a numeral ranging from 1–8, or sometimes higher for dialects with additional tone splits. It should be noted that syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the Chinese dialects. For example, the yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin, but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin.
More iconic systems are use tone numbers, or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as 'Chao tone letter
s'. These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1, and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour
is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows (note that the tone letters will not display properly unless you have a compatible font installed):
A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc. The doubling of the number is commonly used with level tones to distinguish them from tone numbers; tone 3 in Mandarin, for example, is not mid /3/. However, this is not necessary with tone letters, so /33/ = simple /˧/.
IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising /ɔ̌/ and falling /ɔ̂/, are widely supported by IPA fonts, while several Chinese languages have more than one rising or falling tone. One common work-around is to retain standard IPA /ɔ̌/ and /ɔ̂/ for high-rising (/35/) and high-falling (/53/) tones, and to use the subscript diacritics /ɔ̗/ and /ɔ̖/ for low-rising (/13/) and low-falling (/31/) tones.
The Thai language
has five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling. The Thai written script
is an alphasyllabary
which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant.
Vietnamese
uses the Latin alphabet, and the 6 tones are marked by diacritic
s above or below a certain vowel of each syllable. In many words that end in diphthong
s, however, exactly which vowel is marked is still debatable. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:
The Latin-based Hmong
and Iu Mien
alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the ˧ tone) is left unwritten, while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. This system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter typewriter without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien
, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but, unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.
, said to be the most musical of the Iroquoian languages
. Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 23 rising and 32 falling).
In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for High tone and /5/ stands for Low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages, where /1/ may be Low tone and /3/ High tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use ⟨j⟩ or ⟨h⟩ after a vowel to indicate low tone.
Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo
and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having 2 tones, high and low. One variety of Hopi
has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language
.
The Mesoamerican language stock called Oto-Manguean is famously tonal and is the largest language family in Mesoamerica
, containing languages including Zapotec
, Mixtec
, and Otomí
, some of which have as many as 10 or more different tones (Chatino
) and others only two (Matlatzinca
and Chichimeca Jonaz
). Other languages in Mesoamerica that have tones are Huichol
, Yukatek Maya
, Tzotzil Maya of San Bartolo
and Uspantec Maya (Quiché of Uspantán)
, and one variety of Huave
.
A number of languages of South America are tonal. For example, various analyses of the Pirahã language
describe either two or three tones. The Ticuna language
isolate is exceptional for having five level tones (the only other languages to have such a system are the Trique language
and the Usila dialect of Chinantec
(both Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico).
and Norwegian
have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent
, that only appears in words of two or more syllables. Each word has a mandatory tone, though which varies by dialect. Words whose pronunciation differs only in tone are frequently morphologically
unrelated, and may be spelled differently, as in the Norwegian 'bønder' ("farmers") and 'bønner' ("prayers"). The two word tones are called toneme 1 and toneme 2 in Norway and acute accent
and grave accent
in Sweden.
In Limburgish
tones can also occur in words of one syllable: dáág (one day), dààg (several days).
, though these tend to be omitted. Thai
uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Or tone may simply be ignored. This is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades, and likewise Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan
, a variety of Mandarin spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone. Ndjuka, where tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.
Several Kam–Sui languages
of southern China have nine tones, including contour tones, assuming that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. Preliminary work on the Wobe language
of Liberia and Ivory Coast and the Chatino language
s of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones, but many linguists have expressed doubts, believing that many of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects.
and Kru languages
, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian
and Yorùbá
.
established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts, and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese. It is now widely held that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. The historical origin of tone is called tonogenesis, a term coined by James Matisoff
. Tone is frequently an areal
rather than a genealogical feature. That is, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question, and bring their tones with them. In other cases, tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly: the dialect of Cherokee
in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not, although they were only separated in 1838.
Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. (Such trace effects of disappeared tones or other sounds have been nicknamed Cheshirisation
, after the lingering smile of the disappearing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.) In a non-tonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants do. This is usually a minor phonetic detail of voicing. However, if consonant voicing is subsequently lost, that incidental pitch difference may be left over to carry the distinction that the voicing had carried, and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic).This is seen historically in Panjabi
: the Panjabi murmured
(voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared, and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a low tone; if at the end, a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch so as not to interfere with the low and high tones, and so has become a tone of its own: mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Panjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked: the written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.
Similarly, final fricatives or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken
to /h/ and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with the Chinese languages: Two of the four tones of Middle Chinese
, the "rising" and "departing" tones, arose as the Old Chinese
final consonants /ʔ/ and /s/ → /h/ disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most dialects descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split, where each tone split in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced: Vowels following a voiced consonant (depressor consonant
) acquired a lower tone as the voicing lost its distinctiveness.
The same changes affected many other languages in the same area, and at around the same time (AD 1000–1500). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai
, Vietnamese
, and the Lhasa
dialect of Tibetan
.
In general, voiced initial consonants lead to low tones, while vowels after aspirated consonants acquire a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high or rising tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone, so if the glottal stop causes vowel glottalization, that will tend to leave behind a low vowel), whereas a final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as can be seen in the case of Burmese.
Tone arose in the Athabascan languages at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo
, syllables with glottalized consonants (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda
developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey
, they developed high tones, so that the two tonal systems are almost mirror images of each other. Syllables without glottalized codas developed the opposite tone—for example, high tone in Navajo and low tone in Slavey, due to contrast with the tone triggered by the glottalization. Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon
) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa
), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word for "water" *tuː is toneless toː in Hupa, high-tone tó in Navajo, and low-tone tù in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan *-ɢʊtʼ "knee" is toneless -ɢotʼ in Hupa, low-tone -ɡòd in Navajo, and high-tone -ɡóʔ in Slavey. Kingston (2005) provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either (a) tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high F0, or (b) creaky voice
, which tends to produce a low F0. Languages with "stiff" glottalized consonants and tense voice developed high tone on the preceding vowel and those with "slack" glottalized consonants with creaky voice developed low tone.
The Bantu languages
also have "mirror" tone systems, where the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.
Three Algonquian languages
developed tone independently of each other and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne
, Arapaho
, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne, while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following [h] acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.
In Mohawk
, a glottal stop can disappear in a combination of morpheme
s, leaving behind a long falling tone. Note that this has the reverse effect of the postulated rising tone in Mandarin derived from a lost final glottal stop.
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
in language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation
Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s are sometimes called tonemes.
In the most widely-spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour) and pitch range (or register). Most syllables carry their own tone and many words are differentiated solely by tone. Moreover, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
that did have morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
significance. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, however, tones are distinguished by their relative level, words are longer, there are fewer minimal tone pairs
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
, and a single tone may be carried by the entire word, rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.
Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali
Somali phonology
-Consonants:Common Somali has 22 consonant phonemes. Its consonants cover every place of articulation on the IPA chart, though not all of these distinctions are phonemic....
, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese
Japanese pitch accent
Japanese pitch accent is a feature of the Japanese language which distinguishes words in most Japanese dialects, though the nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects...
, fewer than half of the words have drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, and whether a coherent definition is even possible.
Tonal languages
Most languages of sub-Saharan AfricaSub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...
are tonal, notably excepting Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
in the East, and Wolof
Wolof language
Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania, and is the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo language family...
and Fulani
Fula language
The Fula or Fulani language is a language of West Africa. It is spoken as a first language by the and related groups from Senegambia and Guinea to Cameroon and Sudan...
in the West. The Chadic
Chadic languages
The Chadic languages constitute a language family of perhaps 200 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon, belonging to the Afroasiatic phylum...
, Omotic
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...
, and to some extent Cushitic
Cushitic languages
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in the Horn of Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. They are named after the Biblical character Cush, who was identified as an ancestor of the speakers of these specific languages as early as AD 947...
branches of Afroasiatic are tonal—the Omotic languages heavily so—though their sister families of Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, Berber
Berber languages
The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
, and Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
are not.
There are numerous tonal languages in East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
and South East Asia, including all the Chinese languages (though some such as Shanghainese
Shanghainese
Shanghainese , or the Shanghai language , is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese varieties...
are only marginally tonal), Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
, and Lao
Lao language
Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language. Being the primary language of the Lao people, Lao is also an important second language for...
. Some East Asian languages, such as Burmese
Burmese language
The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
have simpler tone systems, which are sometimes called 'register
Register (phonology)
In linguistics, a register language, also known as a pitch-register language, is a language which combines tone and vowel phonation into a single phonological system. Burmese and the Chinese dialect Shanghainese are examples...
' or 'pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
' systems. However, some languages in the region are not tonal at all, including Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
, Khmer
Khmer language
Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...
, and Malay
Malay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
. Of the Tibetan languages, Central Tibetan
Central Tibetan languages
The Central Tibetan languages are the tonal varieties of Tibetan apart from Khams.The composition of the Central Tibetan languages per Bradley , with dialect information from the Tibetan Dialects Project at the University of Bern, is:...
(including the dialect of the capital Lhasa
Lhasa
Lhasa is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China and the second most populous city on the Tibetan Plateau, after Xining. At an altitude of , Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world...
) and Amdo Tibetan
Amdo Tibetan language
The Amdo language is the spoken language of the majority of the people of Amdo in northeastern Tibet, in Chinese states of Qinghai and some parts of Sichuan and Gansu . It is one of the four main spoken languages of Tibetan, the other three being Standard Tibetan Kham and Ladakhi...
are tonal, while Khams Tibetan
Khams Tibetan language
Khams Tibetan is the Tibetan language used by the majority of the people in the Kham region of eastern Tibet . It is one of the four main spoken languages of Tibetan, the other three being those of U-Tsang , Amdo and Western Tibetan...
and Ladakhi
Ladakhi language
The Ladakhi language , now also called Bhoti, and by linguists more generally called Western Archaic Tibetan when the Balti and Burig or Purig or Purki dialects are included, is the predominant language in the Ladakh region of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India, and is also spoken in Baltistan...
are not.
Along with Lahnda
Lahnda languages
The Lahnda or Western Punjabi Languages are an Indo-Aryan languages dialect continuum that are Mutually intelligible and are spoken in South Asia.According to the Ethnologue they include:...
and Western Pahari languages, Punjabi
Punjabi language
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
is unusual among modern Indo-European languages for being a tonal language.
Some of the native languages of North and South America are tonal, notably many of the Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
of Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
and the American Southwest
Southwestern United States
The Southwestern United States is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah...
(including Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
), and especially the Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The...
of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec (with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek
Uspantek language
The Uspanteko is a Mayan language of Guatemala, closely related to K'iche'. It is spoken in the Uspantán and Playa Grande Ixcán municipios, in the Department El Quiché. It is also one of only three Mayan languages to have developed contrastive tone...
, and one dialect of Tzotzil
Tzotzil language
Tzotzil is a Maya language spoken by the indigenous Tzotzil Maya people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. According to an INEGI 2005 census, there are 329,937 speakers of Tzotzil in Mexico, making it the 6th most spoken indigenous language in the country...
have developed simple tone systems.
In Europe, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, Latvian
Latvian language
Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
, Lithuanian
Lithuanian language
Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
, Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
, some dialects of Slovene, and Limburgish have simple tone systems generally characterized as pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
. Other Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
tonal languages, spoken in the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
, are Punjabi
Punjabi language
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
, Lahanda
Lahnda languages
The Lahnda or Western Punjabi Languages are an Indo-Aryan languages dialect continuum that are Mutually intelligible and are spoken in South Asia.According to the Ethnologue they include:...
, Rabinian and Western Pahari.
Languages that are tonal include:
- Some of the Sino-Tibetan languagesSino-Tibetan languagesThe Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
, including the numerically significant ones. Most forms of Chinese are strongly tonal (an exception being ShanghaineseShanghaineseShanghainese , or the Shanghai language , is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese varieties...
, where the system has collapsed to only a two-way contrast at the word level with some initial consonants, and no contrast at all with others); while some of the Tibetan languageTibetan languageThe Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
s, including the standard languages of LhasaLhasaLhasa is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China and the second most populous city on the Tibetan Plateau, after Xining. At an altitude of , Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world...
and BhutanBhutanBhutan , officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked state in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalayas and bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by the People's Republic of China...
and BurmeseBurmese languageThe Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
, are more marginally tonal. However, Nepal BhasaNepal BhasaNepal Bhasa is one of the major languages of Nepal, and is also spoken in India, particularly in Sikkim where it is one of the 11 official languages. Nepal Bhasa is the mother tongue of about 3% of the people in Nepal . It is spoken mainly by the Newars, who chiefly inhabit the towns of the...
, the original language of Kathmandu, is non-tonal, as are several Tibetan dialects and many other Tibeto-Burman languages. - In the Austro-Asiatic family, VietnameseVietnamese languageVietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
and its closest relatives are strongly tonal. Other languages of this family, such as MonMon languageThe Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon, who live in Burma and Thailand. Mon, like the related language Cambodian—but unlike most languages in Mainland Southeast Asia—is not tonal. Mon is spoken by more than a million people today. In recent years, usage of Mon has...
, KhmerKhmer languageKhmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...
, and the Munda languagesMunda languages-Anderson :Gregory Anderson's 1999 proposal is as follows. Individual languages are highlighted in italics.*North Munda **Korku**Kherwarian***Santhali***Mundari*South Munda **Kharia–Juang***Juang***Kharia...
, are non-tonal. - The entire Tai-Kadai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, is strongly tonal.
- The entire Hmong–Mien family is strongly tonal.
- Many Afroasiatic languages in the Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic families have register-tone systems, such as Chadic HausaHausa languageHausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 25 million people, and as a second language by about 18 million more, an approximate total of 43 million people...
. Many of the Omotic tone systems are quite complex. However, many other languages in these families, such as the Cushitic language SomaliSomali languageThe Somali language is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Its nearest relatives are Afar and Oromo. Somali is the best documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies beginning before 1900....
, have minimal tone. - The vast majority of Niger–Congo languagesNiger–Congo languagesThe Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
, such as EweEwe languageEwe is a Niger–Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by approximately six million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, spoken in southeastern Ghana, Togo, and parts of Benin. Other Gbe languages include Fon, Gen, Phla Phera, and Aja...
, IgboIgbo languageIgbo , or Igbo proper, is a native language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group primarily located in southeastern Nigeria. There are approximately 20 million speakers that are mostly in Nigeria and are primarily of Igbo descent. Igbo is a national language of Nigeria. It is written in the Latin...
, LingalaLingala languageLingala, or Ngala, is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a large part of the Republic of the Congo , as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers...
, ManinkaManinka languageManinka, or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande branch of the Niger–Congo languages...
, YorubaYoruba languageYorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
, and the ZuluZulu languageZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
, have register-tone systems. The Kru languagesKru languages-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
have contour tones. Notable non-tonal Niger–Congo languages are SwahiliSwahili languageSwahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
, FulaFula languageThe Fula or Fulani language is a language of West Africa. It is spoken as a first language by the and related groups from Senegambia and Guinea to Cameroon and Sudan...
, and WolofWolof languageWolof is a language spoken in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania, and is the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo language family...
. - Possibly all Nilo-Saharan languagesNilo-Saharan languagesThe Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
have register-tone systems. - All Khoisan languagesKhoisan languagesThe Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion...
in southern Africa have contour-tone systems. - Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languagesAthabaskan languagesAthabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
, such as NavajoNavajo languageNavajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
, have simple register-tone systems (languages in California, Oregon and a few in Alaska excluded), but the languages that have tone fall into two groups that are mirror images of each other. That is, a word which has a high tone in one language will have a cognate with a low tone in another, and vice versa. - Iroquoian languagesIroquoian languagesThe Iroquoian languages are a First Nation and Native American language family.-Family division:*Ruttenber, Edward Manning. 1992 [1872]. History of the Indian tribes of Hudson's River. Hope Farm Press....
are tonal, for example the Mohawk language has three tones. - All Oto-Manguean languagesOto-Manguean languagesOto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The...
are tonal. Most have register-tone systems, some contour systems. These are perhaps the most complex tone systems in North America. - The Tanoan languagesTanoan languagesTanoan is a family of languages spoken in New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.Most of the languages – Tiwa , Tewa, and Towa – are spoken in the Pueblos of New Mexico and were the ones first given the collective name Tanoan, while Kiowa is spoken mostly in southwestern...
. - Scattered languages of the Amazon basinAmazon BasinThe Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries that drains an area of about , or roughly 40 percent of South America. The basin is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela...
, usually with rather simple register-tone systems. - Scattered languages of New GuineaNew GuineaNew Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
, usually with rather simple register-tone systems. - A few Indo-European languages, namely Ancient GreekAncient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
, SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Limburgish, LithuanianLithuanian languageLithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
, the West South Slavic languagesSouth Slavic languagesThe South Slavic languages comprise one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans. These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches by a belt of German, Hungarian and Romanian speakers...
(Slovene and Serbo-CroatianSerbo-CroatianSerbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
), Vedic Sanskrit, and PunjabiPunjabi languagePunjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
have limited word-tone systems which are sometimes called pitch accent or "tonal accents". Generally there can only be at most one tonic syllable per word of 2-5 different registers, as well as additional distinctive and non-distinctive pre- and post-tonic lengths. - Some European-based creole languageCreole languageA creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
s, such as Saramaccan and Papiamentu, have tone from their African substratumSubstratumIn linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...
languages.
The vast majority of Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
are non-tonal, but a small number, for example Ma'ya (which also has lexical stress) have developed tone, and also the Tsat language
Tsat language
Tsat is a language spoken near Sanya, Hainan, China by the Utsuls. Tsat is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within the Austronesian language family, and is related to the Cham languages, originally from the coast of present-day Vietnam...
has developed tone probably as a result of areal linguistic effects and contact with Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Hlai
Li people
The Li or Hlai are a minority ethnic group, the vast majority of whom live off the southern coast of mainland China on Hainan Island, where they are the largest minority ethnic group...
/Li
Li people
The Li or Hlai are a minority ethnic group, the vast majority of whom live off the southern coast of mainland China on Hainan Island, where they are the largest minority ethnic group...
, and the other tonal languages of Hainan. No tonal language has been reported from Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. In some cases it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. For example, the Ket language
Ket language
The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family...
has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, as having four tones by others, but by some as having no tone at all. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on the researcher's interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation
Phonation
Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...
(creaky, murmured or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, in which case Burmese would not be phonemically
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
tonal, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone, in which case it would be considered tonal. Something similar appears to be the case with Ket.
The most thoroughly tonal language is the 19th-century constructed language
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
Solresol
Solresol
Solresol is an artificial language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years...
, which consists of only tone.
Mechanics
Most languages use pitch as intonationIntonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
to convey prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
and pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs exist between syllables with the same segmental features but different tones.
Here is a minimal tone set from Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, here transcribed by diacritics over the vowels:
- A high level tone: /á/ (pinyinPinyinPinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
⟨ā⟩) - A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ⟨á⟩)
- A low tone which dips briefly before, if there is no following syllable, rising to a high pitch: /à/ (pinyin ⟨ǎ⟩)
- A sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ⟨à⟩)
- A neutral tone, sometimes indicated by a dot (·) in Pinyin, has no specific contour; its pitch depends on the tones of the preceding and following syllables. Mandarin speakers refer to this tone as the "light tone" , also called the "fifth tone", "zeroth tone", or "neutral tone". Note, however, that in Mandarin the occurrence of this tone on single syllable words is marginal, and furthermore it only occurs with grammatical syllables. In disyllabic words, there is a strong tendency in modern Mandarin for the second syllable to be pronounced with a light tone.
These tones combine with a syllable such as "ma" to produce different words. A minimal set based on "ma" are, in pinyin transcription,
- mā "mom"
- má "hemp"
- mǎ "horse"
- mà "scold"
- ma (an interrogative particle)
These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence,
- /
- Pinyin: māma mà mǎ de má ma?
- English: "Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?"
A well-known tongue-twister
Tongue-twister
A tongue-twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken word game. Some tongue-twisters produce results which are humorous when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their...
in the Thai language is:
- IPA: /mǎi mài mâi mái/
- "Does new silk burn?"
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.
Register tones and contour tones
Tone systems fall into two broad patterns: register tone systems and contour tone systems.Most Chinese languages use contour tone systems, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour
Contour (linguistics)
In phonetics, contour describes speech sounds which behave as single segments, but which make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. These sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants....
), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages, on the other hand, have register tone systems, where the distinguishing feature is the relative difference between the pitches, such as high, mid, or low, rather than their shapes. In many register tone systems there is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine register and contour tones, such as many Kru languages
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
, where nouns are distinguished by contour tones and verbs by register. Others, such as Yoruba
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
, have phonetic contours, but these can easily be analysed as sequences of register tones, with for example sequences of high–low /áà/ becoming falling [âː], and sequences of low–high /àá/ becoming rising [ǎː].
Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi
Mpi language
-Phonology:Mpi has six tones and two phonations in its vowels, modal voice and stiff voice:...
, for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones.
Lexical tones more complex than dipping (falling–rising) or peaking (rising–falling) are quite rare, perhaps nonexistent, though prosody may produce such effects. However, the Old Xiang
Old Xiang
Old Xiang, also known as Lou-Shao is a conservative form of Xiang Chinese, or Hunnanese. It is spoken in the central areas of Hunan where it has been to some extent isolated from neighboring Chinese languages, Mandarin and Gan, and it retains the voiced stops of Middle Chinese, which are otherwise...
dialect of Qiyang
Qiyang dialect
Qiyang dialect is a dialect of Xiang Chinese spoken in Qiyang County, Hunan province.-Tones:Qiyang dialect is quite unusual in that it is reported to have two "double contour" tones, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high fall – low fall and low fall – high fall: the entering tones yin qu ...
is reported to have two "double contour" lexical tones, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high falling – low falling and low falling – high falling: ˦˨˧˨ and ˨˩˦˨ (4232 and 2142).
Register languages
The term "register", when not used in the phrase "register tone", commonly indicates vowel phonationPhonation
Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...
combined with tone in a single phonological system. Burmese
Burmese language
The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
, for example, is a register language, where differences in pitch are so intertwined with vowel phonation that neither can be considered without the other.
Tone terracing
Tones are realized as pitch only in a relative sense. 'High tone' and 'low tone' are only meaningful relative to the speaker's vocal range and in comparing one syllable to the next, rather than as a contrast of absolute pitch such as one finds in music. As a result, when one combines tone with sentence prosody, the absolute pitch of a high tone at the end of a prosodic unitProsodic unit
In linguistics, a prosodic unit, often called an intonation unit or intonational phrase, is a segment of speech that occurs with a single prosodic contour...
may be lower than that of a low tone at the beginning of the unit, because of the universal tendency (in both tonal and non-tonal languages) for pitch to decrease with time in a process called downdrift
Downdrift
In phonetics, downdrift is the cumulative lowering of pitch over time due to interactions among tones, called downstep, in a tonal language. It is distinct from the general lowering of the pitch during prosodic contours of a tonal or non-tonal language....
.
Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones; the effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced
Terrace (agriculture)
Terraces are used in farming to cultivate sloped land. Graduated terrace steps are commonly used to farm on hilly or mountainous terrain. Terraced fields decrease erosion and surface runoff, and are effective for growing crops requiring much water, such as rice...
rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing
Tone terracing
Tone terracing is a type of phonetic downdrift, where the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones...
.
Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after the original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called floating tone
Floating tone
A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes....
s.
Tone sandhi
In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into a different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很 [xɤn˨˩˦] 'very' and 好 [xaʊ˨˩˦] 'good' produce the phrase 很好 [xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦] 'very good'.Word tones and syllable tones
Another difference between tonal languages is whether the tones apply independently to each syllable or to the word as a whole. In CantoneseStandard Cantonese
Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a language that originated in the vicinity of Canton in southern China, and is often regarded as the prestige dialect of Yue Chinese....
, Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
, and to some extent the Kru languages
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
, each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese
Shanghainese
Shanghainese , or the Shanghai language , is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese varieties...
, the Scandinavian languages, and many Bantu languages
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, the contour of each tone operates at the word level. That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3 × 3 × 3 = 27) than a monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
are word-tone languages.
Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example, a number of Mandarin suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable:
| Tone in isolation | Tone pattern with added 'neutral tone' |
Example | Pinyin | English meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| high ˥ | ˥.˨ | bōli | glass | |
| rising ˧˥ | ˧˥.˧ | bóbo | elder uncle | |
| dipping ˨˩˦ | ˨˩.˦ | lǎba | horn | |
| falling ˥˩ | ˥˩.˩ | tùzi | rabbit |
After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid-register tone the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: the contour remains the same (˨˩˦) whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words, the tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive.
Tonal polarity
Languages with simple tone systems or pitch accentPitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
may have one or two syllables specified for tone, with the rest of the word taking a default tone. Such languages differ in which tone is marked and which is the default. In Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, while marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani
Sekani language
The Sekani language is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Sekani people of north-central British Columbia, Canada.-Consonants:Sekani has 33 consonants:* *Sekani, like other Athabaskan languages, does not contrast fricatives with approximants....
, however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone. There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables, whereas in Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, stressed syllables have a lower pitch.
Uses of tone
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and HmongHmong language
Hmong or Mong is the common name for a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmong–Mien/Miao–Yao language family spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos...
. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms, rather than in the grammar, though some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone. (In Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
, tones may have grammatical functions.) However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems reminiscent of East Asia, but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, and polarity
Grammatical polarity
Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative and negative. In English, grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence or absence of the modifier not, which negates the statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers: Italian and Interlingua have non, Spanish has...
, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between 'you went' and 'I won't go'. In colloquial Yoruba
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may assimilate
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
to each other, and consonants elide
Elision
Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
, so that much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "talking drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling
Whistled language
Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances...
the tones of speech.
Phonetic notation
There are three main approaches to notating tones in phonetic descriptions of a language.- The easiest from a typological perspective is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned numerals, and each tone transcribed as a numeral or sequence of numerals. Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic, for example with high tone being assigned the numeral 1, 3, or 5, and so have not been adopted for the International Phonetic AlphabetInternational Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
. - Also simple for simple tone systems is a series of diacritics, such as ⟨ó⟩ for high tone and ⟨ò⟩ for low tone. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one work-around). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are ⟨ő ó ō ò ȍ⟩. These may be combined to form contour tones, ⟨ô ǒ o᷄ o᷅ o᷆ o᷇ o᷈ o᷉⟩, though font support is sparse. Sometimes a non-IPA vertical diacritic for a second, higher, mid tone is seen, ⟨o̍⟩, so that in a language with four (or six) level tones, they may be transcribed ⟨ó o̍ ō ò⟩.
- The most flexible system is that of tone letterTone letterTone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.-Chao tone letters :A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was invented by Yuen Ren Chao and adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet.Combinations of these tone...
s, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, as in Liberia and southern China.
Africa
In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), usually a set of accent marks is used to mark tone. The most common phonetic set (which is also included in the International Phonetic AlphabetInternational Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
) is found below:
| High tone | acute | á |
| Mid tone | macron | ā |
| Low tone | grave | à |
Several variations are found. In many three-tone languages, it is common to mark High and Low tone as indicated above, but to omit marking of the Mid tone, e.g., má (High), ma (Mid), mà (Low). Similarly, in some two-tone languages, only one tone is marked explicitly.
With more complex tonal systems, such as in the Kru
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
and Omotic languages
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...
, it is usual to indicate tone with numbers, with 1 for HIGH and 4 or 5 for LOW in Kru, but 1 for LOW and 5 for HIGH in Omotic. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.
Asia
In the Chinese tradition, numerals are assigned to various tones (see Tone numberTone number
A tone number is a numeral used in a notational system for marking the tones of a language. The number is usually placed after the romanized syllable. Notice that a number may have very different meanings in different contexts since the systems may have developed independently.Other means of...
). For instance, Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
has four lexically contrastive tones, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones. Syllables can sometimes be toneless and are described as having a neutral tone, typically indicated by omitting tone markings. Chinese dialects are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories ping 'level', shang 'rising', qu 'exiting', ru 'entering', based on the traditional analysis of Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
(see Four tones
Four tones
The four tones of Chinese phonology are four traditional tone-classes of words derived from the four phonemic tones of Middle Chinese. They are even level , rising , going departing , and entering checked .-Names:In Middle Chinese, each of the tone names carries the tone it identifies: 平 even ,...
); note that these are not at all the same as the four tones of modern standard Mandarin. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called yin and yang. Syllables carrying the ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in all Chinese dialects, so that ru is not a tonal category in the sense used by Western linguistics, but rather a category of syllable structures. Chinese phonologists perceived these checked syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. During the period of Middle Chinese, when the tonal categories were established, the shang and qu tones also had characteristic final obstruents with concomitant tonic differences, whereas syllables bearing the ping tone ended in a simple sonorant. An alternate to using the Chinese category names is to assign to each category a numeral ranging from 1–8, or sometimes higher for dialects with additional tone splits. It should be noted that syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the Chinese dialects. For example, the yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin, but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin.
More iconic systems are use tone numbers, or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as 'Chao tone letter
Tone letter
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.-Chao tone letters :A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was invented by Yuen Ren Chao and adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet.Combinations of these tone...
s'. These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1, and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour
Tone contour
A tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia.-Themes:When the...
is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows (note that the tone letters will not display properly unless you have a compatible font installed):
| High tone | 55 | ˥ | (Tone 1) |
| Mid rising tone | 35 | ˧˥ | (Tone 2) |
| Low dipping tone | 214 | ˨˩˦ | (Tone 3) |
| High falling tone | 51 | ˥˩ | (Tone 4) |
A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc. The doubling of the number is commonly used with level tones to distinguish them from tone numbers; tone 3 in Mandarin, for example, is not mid /3/. However, this is not necessary with tone letters, so /33/ = simple /˧/.
IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising /ɔ̌/ and falling /ɔ̂/, are widely supported by IPA fonts, while several Chinese languages have more than one rising or falling tone. One common work-around is to retain standard IPA /ɔ̌/ and /ɔ̂/ for high-rising (/35/) and high-falling (/53/) tones, and to use the subscript diacritics /ɔ̗/ and /ɔ̖/ for low-rising (/13/) and low-falling (/31/) tones.
The Thai language
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
has five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling. The Thai written script
Thai alphabet
Thai script , is used to write the Thai language and other, minority, languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks ....
is an alphasyllabary
Abugida
An abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant.
Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
uses the Latin alphabet, and the 6 tones are marked by diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s above or below a certain vowel of each syllable. In many words that end in diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s, however, exactly which vowel is marked is still debatable. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:
| Name | Contour | Diacritic | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ngang | mid level, ˧ | not marked | a |
| huyền | low falling, ˨˩ | grave accent Grave accent The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient... |
à |
| sắc | high rising, ˧˥ | acute accent Acute accent The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:... |
á |
| hỏi | dipping, ˧˩˧ | hook Hook (diacritic) In typesetting, the hook is a diacritic mark placed on top of vowels in the Vietnamese alphabet. In shape it looks like a tiny question mark without the dot underneath. For example, a capital A with a hook is "Ả", and a lower case "u" with a hook is "ủ". It functions as a tone marker... |
ả |
| ngã | creaky rising, ˧˥ˀ | tilde Tilde The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics.... |
ã |
| nặng | creaky falling, ˧ˀ | dot below Dot (diacritic) When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct , or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' and 'combining dot below'... |
ạ |
The Latin-based Hmong
Hmong language
Hmong or Mong is the common name for a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmong–Mien/Miao–Yao language family spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos...
and Iu Mien
Iu Mien language
The Iu Mien language is one of the main languages spoken by the Yao people in China, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and more recently the United States, in diaspora. There are about 2,172,000 speakers in total, according to census data in 2000 from China, Vietnam, Thai, Laos, United States of America,...
alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the ˧ tone) is left unwritten, while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. This system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter typewriter without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien
Iu Mien language
The Iu Mien language is one of the main languages spoken by the Yao people in China, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and more recently the United States, in diaspora. There are about 2,172,000 speakers in total, according to census data in 2000 from China, Vietnam, Thai, Laos, United States of America,...
, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but, unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.
Americas
Several North American languages have tone, one of which is Oklahoma CherokeeCherokee language
Cherokee is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people which uses a unique syllabary writing system. It is the only Southern Iroquoian language that remains spoken. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language.-North American etymology:...
, said to be the most musical of the Iroquoian languages
Iroquoian languages
The Iroquoian languages are a First Nation and Native American language family.-Family division:*Ruttenber, Edward Manning. 1992 [1872]. History of the Indian tribes of Hudson's River. Hope Farm Press....
. Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 23 rising and 32 falling).
In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for High tone and /5/ stands for Low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages, where /1/ may be Low tone and /3/ High tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use ⟨j⟩ or ⟨h⟩ after a vowel to indicate low tone.
Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having 2 tones, high and low. One variety of Hopi
Hopi language
Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, USA, although today some Hopi are monolingual English speakers.The use of the language has gradually declined over the course of the 20th century...
has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language
Cheyenne language
The Cheyenne language is a Native American language spoken by the Cheyenne people, predominantly in present-day Montana and Oklahoma in the United States. It is part of the Algonquian language family...
.
The Mesoamerican language stock called Oto-Manguean is famously tonal and is the largest language family in Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
, containing languages including Zapotec
Zapotec language
The Zapotec language are a group of closely related indigenous Mesoamerican languages spoken by the Zapotec people from the southwestern-central highlands of Mexico. Present-day native speakers are estimated to number over half a million, with the majority inhabiting the state of Oaxaca....
, Mixtec
Mixtecan languages
The Mixtec language, actually multiple languages, belong to Otomanguean language family of Mexico, and are closely related to the Trique and Cuicatec languages. They are spoken by over half a million people. Identifying how many Mixtec languages there are in this complex dialect continuum poses...
, and Otomí
Otomi language
Otomi is an Oto-Manguean language and one of the indigenous languages of Mexico, spoken by approximately 240,000 indigenous Otomi people in the central altiplano region of Mexico. The language is spoken in many different dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, therefore it is in...
, some of which have as many as 10 or more different tones (Chatino
Chatino language
The Chatino language is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, which is classified under the Zapotecan branch of the Oto-Manguean language family...
) and others only two (Matlatzinca
Matlatzinca language
The Matlatzinca language, also called Tlahuica or Ocuiltec, is an indigenous language of Mexico spoken by the Matlatzinca people in the southern part of the State of Mexico. It is an Oto-Manguean language of the Oto-Pamean subgroup...
and Chichimeca Jonaz
Chichimeca Jonaz language
Chichimeca or Chichimeca Jonaz is an indigenous language of Mexico spoken by around 200 Chichimeca Jonaz people in Misión de Chichimecas near San Luis de la Paz in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. The Chichimeca Jonaz language belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean linguistic family...
). Other languages in Mesoamerica that have tones are Huichol
Huichol language
The Huichol language is an indigenous language of Mexico which belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the ethnic group widely known as the Huichol , whose mountainous territory extends over portions of the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Durango, mostly in Jalisco...
, Yukatek Maya
Yukatek Maya language
Yucatec Maya , called Màaya t'àan by its speakers, is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize...
, Tzotzil Maya of San Bartolo
Tzotzil language
Tzotzil is a Maya language spoken by the indigenous Tzotzil Maya people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. According to an INEGI 2005 census, there are 329,937 speakers of Tzotzil in Mexico, making it the 6th most spoken indigenous language in the country...
and Uspantec Maya (Quiché of Uspantán)
K'iche' language
The K’iche’ language is a part of the Mayan language family. It is spoken by many K'iche' people in the central highlands of Guatemala. With close to a million speakers , it is the second-most widely spoken language in the country after Spanish...
, and one variety of Huave
Huave language
Huave is a language isolate spoken by the indigenous Huave people on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The language is spoken in four villages on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southeast of the state, by around 18,000 people...
.
A number of languages of South America are tonal. For example, various analyses of the Pirahã language
Pirahã language
Pirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
describe either two or three tones. The Ticuna language
Ticuna language
Tïcuna, or Tïkuna, is a language spoken by approximately 40,000 people in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Tïcuna people. Tïcuna is generally classified as a language isolate, but may be related to the extinct Yuri language...
isolate is exceptional for having five level tones (the only other languages to have such a system are the Trique language
Trique language
The Trique language is an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico spoken by the Trique indigenous group of the state of Oaxaca and elsewhere...
and the Usila dialect of Chinantec
Chinantec
The Chinantecs are an indigenous people that live in Oaxaca and Veracruz, Mexico, especially in the districts of Cuicatlán, Ixtlán de Juárez, Tuxtepec and Choapan.The Chinantec languages belong to the Chinantecan branch of the Oto-Manguean family...
(both Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico).
Europe
Both SwedishSwedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, that only appears in words of two or more syllables. Each word has a mandatory tone, though which varies by dialect. Words whose pronunciation differs only in tone are frequently morphologically
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
unrelated, and may be spelled differently, as in the Norwegian 'bønder' ("farmers") and 'bønner' ("prayers"). The two word tones are called toneme 1 and toneme 2 in Norway and acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
and grave accent
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
in Sweden.
In Limburgish
Limburgish language
Limburgish, also called Limburgian or Limburgic is a group of East Low Franconian language varieties spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, near the common Dutch / Belgian / German border...
tones can also occur in words of one syllable: dáág (one day), dààg (several days).
Practical orthographies
In practical alphabetic orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in pinyinPinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
, though these tend to be omitted. Thai
Thai alphabet
Thai script , is used to write the Thai language and other, minority, languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks ....
uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Or tone may simply be ignored. This is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades, and likewise Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan
Dungan language
The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China.-History:...
, a variety of Mandarin spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone. Ndjuka, where tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.
Number of tones
Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language of Nigeria is described as distinguishing six surface tone registers. Since tone contours may involve up to two shifts in pitch, there are theoretically 5 x 5 x 5 = 125 distinct tones for a language with five registers. However, the most that are actually used in a language is a tenth of that number.Several Kam–Sui languages
Kam–Sui languages
The Kam–Sui languages are a branch of the Tai–Kadai languages spoken by the Kam–Sui peoples. They are spoken mainly in eastern Guizhou, western Hunan, and northern Guangxi in southern China. Small pockets of Kam–Sui speakers are also found in northern Vietnam and Laos.-Classification:Kam–Sui...
of southern China have nine tones, including contour tones, assuming that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. Preliminary work on the Wobe language
Wobé language
Wobé is a Kru language spoken in Ivory Coast. It is one of several languages in a dialect continuum called Wèè .-Tone:Wobé is known for claims that it has the largest number of tones of any language in the world...
of Liberia and Ivory Coast and the Chatino language
Chatino language
The Chatino language is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, which is classified under the Zapotecan branch of the Oto-Manguean language family...
s of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones, but many linguists have expressed doubts, believing that many of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects.
Tonal consonants
Tone is carried by the word or syllable, so syllabic consonants such as nasals and trills may bear tone. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many BantuBantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
and Kru languages
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
and Yorùbá
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
.
Origin
André-Georges HaudricourtAndré-Georges Haudricourt
André-Georges Haudricourt was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in Picardie. He obtained his baccalauréat in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique in 1931. He studied Genetics in Paris and Leningrad...
established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts, and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese. It is now widely held that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. The historical origin of tone is called tonogenesis, a term coined by James Matisoff
James Matisoff
James A. Matisoff is a professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia....
. Tone is frequently an areal
Areal feature (linguistics)
In linguistics, an areal feature is any feature shared by languages within the same geographical area as a consequence of linguistic diffusion....
rather than a genealogical feature. That is, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question, and bring their tones with them. In other cases, tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly: the dialect of Cherokee
Cherokee language
Cherokee is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people which uses a unique syllabary writing system. It is the only Southern Iroquoian language that remains spoken. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language.-North American etymology:...
in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not, although they were only separated in 1838.
Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. (Such trace effects of disappeared tones or other sounds have been nicknamed Cheshirisation
Cheshirisation
Cheshirisation, or cheshirization, is a term coined by James Matisoff to refer to a type of sound change where a trace remains of a sound that has otherwise disappeared from a word. The term is a neologism, i.e. it is not an established scientific term. It is used here to describe a process that...
, after the lingering smile of the disappearing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.) In a non-tonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants do. This is usually a minor phonetic detail of voicing. However, if consonant voicing is subsequently lost, that incidental pitch difference may be left over to carry the distinction that the voicing had carried, and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic).This is seen historically in Panjabi
Punjabi language
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
: the Panjabi murmured
Breathy voice
Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...
(voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared, and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a low tone; if at the end, a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch so as not to interfere with the low and high tones, and so has become a tone of its own: mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Panjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked: the written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.
Similarly, final fricatives or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
to /h/ and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with the Chinese languages: Two of the four tones of Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
, the "rising" and "departing" tones, arose as the Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
final consonants /ʔ/ and /s/ → /h/ disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most dialects descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split, where each tone split in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced: Vowels following a voiced consonant (depressor consonant
Depressor consonant
A depressor consonant is a consonant that depresses the tone of its or a neighboring syllable. This is a consequence of the phonation of the consonant. The Nguni languages of South Africa are well known for the lowering effects of certain consonants on tone, as are the Wu dialects of Chinese. ...
) acquired a lower tone as the voicing lost its distinctiveness.
The same changes affected many other languages in the same area, and at around the same time (AD 1000–1500). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
, Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, and the Lhasa
Lhasa
Lhasa is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China and the second most populous city on the Tibetan Plateau, after Xining. At an altitude of , Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world...
dialect of Tibetan
Tibetan language
The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
.
In general, voiced initial consonants lead to low tones, while vowels after aspirated consonants acquire a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high or rising tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone, so if the glottal stop causes vowel glottalization, that will tend to leave behind a low vowel), whereas a final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as can be seen in the case of Burmese.
Tone arose in the Athabascan languages at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
, syllables with glottalized consonants (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda
Syllable coda
In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a rime. Some syllables consist only of a nucleus with no coda...
developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey
Slavey language
Slavey is an Athabaskan language spoken among the Slavey First Nations of Canada in the Northwest Territories where it also has official status....
, they developed high tones, so that the two tonal systems are almost mirror images of each other. Syllables without glottalized codas developed the opposite tone—for example, high tone in Navajo and low tone in Slavey, due to contrast with the tone triggered by the glottalization. Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon
Koyukon language
Koyukon is an Athabaskan language spoken along the Koyukuk and middle Yukon River in western interior Alaska. It has about 300 speakers - generally older adults bilingual in English - from an ethnic population of 2,300....
) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa
Hupa language
-External links :* * overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages*...
), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word for "water" *tuː is toneless toː in Hupa, high-tone tó in Navajo, and low-tone tù in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan *-ɢʊtʼ "knee" is toneless -ɢotʼ in Hupa, low-tone -ɡòd in Navajo, and high-tone -ɡóʔ in Slavey. Kingston (2005) provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either (a) tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high F0, or (b) creaky voice
Creaky voice
In linguistics, creaky voice , is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact...
, which tends to produce a low F0. Languages with "stiff" glottalized consonants and tense voice developed high tone on the preceding vowel and those with "slack" glottalized consonants with creaky voice developed low tone.
The Bantu languages
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
also have "mirror" tone systems, where the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.
Three Algonquian languages
Algonquian languages
The Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...
developed tone independently of each other and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne
Cheyenne language
The Cheyenne language is a Native American language spoken by the Cheyenne people, predominantly in present-day Montana and Oklahoma in the United States. It is part of the Algonquian language family...
, Arapaho
Arapaho language
The Arapaho language or hinono'eitiit is a Plains Algonquian language spoken almost entirely by elders in Wyoming, and to a much lesser extent in Oklahoma. It is in great danger of becoming extinct. As of 1996, there were approximately 1,000 speakers of theNorthern Arapaho...
, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne, while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following [h] acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.
In Mohawk
Mohawk language
Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken by around 2,000 people of the Mohawk nation in the United States and Canada . Mohawk has the largest number of speakers of the Northern Iroquoian languages; today it is the only one with greater than a thousand remaining...
, a glottal stop can disappear in a combination of morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s, leaving behind a long falling tone. Note that this has the reverse effect of the postulated rising tone in Mandarin derived from a lost final glottal stop.
See also
- Pitch accentPitch accentPitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
- Tone terracingTone terracingTone terracing is a type of phonetic downdrift, where the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones...
- DowndriftDowndriftIn phonetics, downdrift is the cumulative lowering of pitch over time due to interactions among tones, called downstep, in a tonal language. It is distinct from the general lowering of the pitch during prosodic contours of a tonal or non-tonal language....
- DownstepDownstep (phonetics)In phonetics, downstep is a phonemic or phonetic downward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of West Africa, but the pitch accent of Japanese is quite similar to downstep in Africa. Downstep contrasts with the much rarer upstep...
- Floating toneFloating toneA floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes....
- Tone contourTone contourA tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia.-Themes:When the...
- Tone sandhiTone sandhiTone sandhi is a feature of tonal languages in which the tones assigned to individual words vary based on the pronunciation of the words that surround them in a phrase or sentence. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining".-Languages with tone sandhi:Not all...
- Meeussen's ruleMeeussen's ruleMeeussen’s rule is the name for a special case of tone reduction in Bantu languages. The tonal alternation it describes is the lowering in some contexts of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent High tones , resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the...
- Tone nameTone nameIn the Chinese and Vietnamese languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use.*In Chinese, tone names are given in terms of the four tones, namely level , rising , departing , and entering , as well as dark and light , and high and low .* Standard Vietnamese has six...
- Tone patternTone patternTone patterns are common constraints in classical Chinese poetry.The four tones of Middle Chinese—level , rising , departing , and entering tones—are categorized into level tones and oblique tones. All level tones are level. All other tones are oblique...
- Musical languageMusical languageMusical languages are languages based on musical sounds, either instead of or in addition to articulation. They can be categorized as constructed languages, and as whistled languages. Whistled languages are dependent on an underlying articulatory language, in actual use in various cultures as a...
- Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone DenLion-Eating Poet in the Stone DenThe Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is a famous example of constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin....
External links
- World map of tone languages The World Atlas of Language Structures Online