Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish
lexical or grammatical meaning – that is,
to distinguish or to 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.
Languages that do have this feature are called
tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns
of such a language are sometimes called tonemes,
by analogy with phoneme.
Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast
Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas;
as many as seventy percent of world languages
may be tonal.In many tonal African languages,
such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished
by their pitch level relative to each other,
known as a register tone system.
In multisyllable words, 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.
In the most widely spoken tonal language,
Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished
by their distinctive shape, known as contour,
with each tone having a different internal
pattern of rising and falling pitch.
Many words, especially monosyllabic ones,
are differentiated solely by tone.
In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often
carries its own tone.
Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little
role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese,
though the tones descend from features in
Old Chinese that had morphological significance
(such as changing a verb to a noun or vice
versa).
Contour systems are typical of languages of
the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area,
including Kra–Dai, Vietic and Sino-Tibetan
languages.
The Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and
Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are
dominated by register systems.
Some languages combine both systems, such
as Cantonese, which produces three varieties
of contour tone at three different pitch levels,
and the Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench,
which employs five level tones and one or
two rising tones across levels.Many languages
use tone in a more limited way.
In Japanese, fewer than half of the words
have a 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.
== List of tonal languages ==
=== 
Africa ===
Most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members
of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly
tonal; notably excepting Swahili (in the Southeast),
most languages spoken in the Senegambia (among
them Wolof, Serer and Cangin languages), Koyra
Chiini and Fulani.
The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal
(Chadic, Omotic) and nontonal (Semitic, Berber,
Egyptian, and most Cushitic) branches.
All three Khoisan language families: Khoe,
Kx'a and Tuu, are tonal.
=== Asia ===
Numerous tonal languages are widely spoken
in China and Mainland Southeast Asia.
Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are mostly
tonal, including Thai, Lao, all the varieties
of Chinese (though some, such as Shanghainese,
are only marginally tonal) and Burmese with
few exceptions such as Amdo Tibetan.
The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the
most tonal languages in the world, with as
many as twelve phonemically distinct tones.
Austroasiatic (such as Khmer and Mon) and
Austronesian (such as Malay) languages are
mostly non tonal with the rare exception of
Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and
Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul.
Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from
heavy Chinese influence on both languages.
There were tones in Middle Korean.
Other languages represented in the region,
such as Mongolian, Uyghur, and Japanese belong
to language families that do not contain any
tonality as defined here.
In South Asia, many Indo-Aryan languages have
tonality, including many languages from the
Northwest zone, like Punjabi, Dogri, and Lahnda
and many Bengali-Assamese languages such as
Sylheti, Rohingya, Chittagonian and Chakma.
=== Europe ===
In Europe, Indo-European languages such as
Swedish, Norwegian, Limburgish and Scots (Germanic
languages), Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (Slavic
languages), Lithuanian and Latvian (Baltic
languages), have tonal characteristics.
=== Australasia ===
Although the Austronesian language family
has some tonal members such as New Caledonia's
Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have
been discovered in Australia.
Tone is also present in many Papuan languages.
=== America ===
A large number of North, South and Central
American languages are tonal, including many
of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and
the American Southwest (including Navajo),
and 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 tone systems.
However, although tone systems have been recorded
for many American languages, little theoretical
work has been completed for the characterization
of their tone systems.
In different cases, Oto-Manguean tone languages
in Mexico have been found to possess tone
systems similar to both Asian and African
tone languages.
=== Summary ===
Languages that are tonal include:
Over 50% of the Sino-Tibetan languages.
All Sinitic languages (most prominently, the
Chinese languages), some Tibetic languages,
including the standard languages of Lhasa
and Bhutan, and Burmese.
In the Austroasiatic family, Vietnamese and
other members of the Vietic languages family
are strongly tonal.
Other branches of this family, such as Mon,
Khmer, and the Munda languages, are entirely
non-tonal.
Some of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian
languages in New Caledonia (such as Paicî
and Cèmuhî) and New Guinea (such as Mor,
Ma'ya and Matbat) plus some of the Chamic
languages such as Tsat in Hainan are tonal.
The entire Kra–Dai family, spoken mainly
in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and
including Thai and Lao is tonal.
The entire Hmong–Mien family is highly tonal.
Many Afroasiatic languages in the Chadic and
Omotic branches have register tone systems,
including Hausa.
Omotic languages are an exception in having
both contour and register tones.
Some Cushitic languages also have tone systems.
The vast majority of Niger–Congo languages,
such as Ewe, Igbo, Lingala, Maninka, Yoruba,
and the Zulu, have register tone systems.
The Kru languages have contour tones.
Notable non-tonal Niger–Congo languages
are Swahili, Fula, and Wolof.
Most Nilo-Saharan languages including Dinka
and Luo have register tone systems.
All Khoisan languages in southern Africa have
contour tone systems; some languages like
Sandawe have mixed tone systems like that
of Cantonese.
Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan
languages, such as Navajo, have register tone
systems (languages in California, Oregon and
a few in Alaska excluded).
The Athabaskan tone languages fall into two
"mirror image" groups.
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 languages like Mohawk commonly have
register tone; Oklahoma Cherokee has the most
extensive tonal inventory, with six tones,
of which four are contours.
Here the correlation between contour tone
and simple syllable structures is clearly
shown; whereas Mohawk, with three register
tones in stressed syllables only, permits
a large number of consonant clusters, Cherokee
phonotactics permit only syllables of the
structure (s)(C)V.
All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal.
Most have register tone, though some have
contour tones as well.
In some cases, as with Mixtec, tone system
variations between dialects are sufficiently
great to cause mutual unintelligibility.
Many languages of New Guinea like Siane possess
register tone systems.
Some Indo-European languages as well as others
possess what is termed pitch accent, where
only the stressed syllable of a word can have
different contour tones; these are not always
considered to be cases of tone language.
Some European-based creole languages, such
as Saramaccan and Papiamento, have tone from
their African substratum languages.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 19th-century constructed language Solresol
can consist of only tone, although, unlike
all natural tonal languages, Solresol's tone
is absolute rather than relative and no tone
sandhi occurs.
== Mechanics ==
Most languages use pitch as intonation 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 (or
larger minimal sets) exist between syllables
with the same segmental features (consonants
and vowels) 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/ (pinyin ⟨ā⟩)
A tone starting with mid pitch and rising
to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ⟨á⟩)
A low tone with a slight fall (if there is
no following syllable, it may start with a
dip then rise to a high pitch): /à/ (pinyin
⟨ǎ⟩)
A short, sharply falling tone, starting high
and falling to the bottom of the speaker's
vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ⟨à⟩)
A neutral tone, with no specific contour,
used on weak syllables; its pitch depends
chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable.These
tones combine with a syllable such as ma to
produce different words.
A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription,
mā (媽/妈) 'mother'
má (麻/麻) 'hemp'
mǎ (馬/马) 'horse'
mà (罵/骂) 'scold'
ma (嗎/吗) (an interrogative particle)These
may be combined into the rather contrived
sentence,
妈妈骂马的麻吗?/媽媽罵馬的麻嗎?
Pinyin: māma mà mǎde má ma?
IPA /máma mâ màtə mǎ ma/
Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's
hemp?'A well-known tongue-twister in Standard
Thai is:
ไหมใหม่ไหม้มั้ย.
IPA: /mǎi mài mâi mái/
Translation: 'Does new silk burn?'Vietnamese
has its version:
Bấy nay bây bày bảy bẫy bậy.
Chữ Nôm: 卑𠉞𣊾排𦉱擺敗
IPA: [ɓʌ̌i̯ nai̯ ɓʌi̯ ɓʌ̂i̯ ɓa᷉i̯
ɓʌ̌ˀi̯ ɓʌ̂ˀi̯]
Translation: 'All along you've set up the
seven traps incorrectly!'Cantonese has its
version:
一人因一日引一刃一印而忍
Jyutping: jat1 jan4 jan1 jat1 jat6 jan5 jat1
jan6 jat1 jan3 ji4 jan2
IPA:
Translation: A person why stay endured due
to a day have introduced a knife and a print.Tone
is most frequently manifested on vowels, but
in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic
consonants occur they will bear tone as well.
This is especially common with syllabic nasals,
for example in many Bantu and Kru languages,
but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian.
It is also possible for lexically contrastive
pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes
instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus
(vowels), which is the case in Punjabi.Tones
can interact in complex ways through a process
known as tone sandhi.
== Tone and intonation ==
Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic
intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as
well sometimes by changes in phonation.
Lexical tone coexists with intonation, with
the lexical changes of pitch like waves superimposed
on larger swells.
For example, Luksaneeyanawin (1993) describes
three intonational patterns in Thai: falling
(with semantics of "finality, closedness and
definiteness"), rising ("non-finality, openness
and non-definiteness") and "convoluted" (contrariness,
conflict and emphasis).
The phonetic realization of these intonational
patterns superimposed on the five lexical
tones of Thai (in citation form) are as follows:
With convoluted intonation, it appears that
high and falling tone conflate, while the
low tone with convoluted intonation has the
same contour as rising tone with falling intonation.
== Register tones and contour tones ==
Tone systems fall into two broad patterns,
according to whether contour tones exist.
Most varieties of Chinese 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
non-contour tone (or 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 such 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 relative-pitch
and contour tones, such as many Kru languages,
where nouns are distinguished by contour tones
and verbs by pitch.
Others, such as Yoruba, have phonetic contours,
but these can easily be analysed as sequences
of single-pitch 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.
=== Register phonation ===
In a number of East Asian languages, tonal
differences are closely intertwined with phonation
differences.
In Vietnamese, for example, the ngã and sắc
tones are both high-rising but the former
is distinguished by having glottalization
in the middle.
Similarly, the nặng and huyền tones are
both low-falling, but the nặng tone is shorter
and pronounced with creaky voice at the end,
while the huyền tone is longer and often
has breathy voice.
In some languages, such as Burmese, pitch
and phonation are so closely intertwined that
the two are combined in a single phonological
system, where neither can be considered without
the other.
The distinctions of such systems are termed
registers, not to be confused with "register
tones" described above.
== Tone terracing and tone sandhi ==
=== 
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 unit 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 tones.
=== 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 Chinese, 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 Cantonese, 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
(phonemic) 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 Chinese
suffixes and grammatical particles have what
is called (when describing Mandarin Chinese)
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.
== Tonal polarity ==
Languages with simple tone systems or pitch
accent 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, whereas 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.
== Uses of tone ==
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical.
This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages
such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong.
That is, tone is used to distinguish words
which would otherwise be homonyms, rather
than in the grammar, but some Yue Chinese
dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone.
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 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.
Note that tonal languages are not distributed
evenly across the same range as non-tonal
languages.
Instead, the majority of tone languages belong
to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Vietic
groups, which are then composed by a large
majority of tone languages and dominate a
single region.
Only in limited locations (South Africa, New
Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others) are
tone languages occurring as individual members
or small clusters within a non-tone dominated
area.
In some locations, like Central America, it
may represent no more than an incidental effect
of which languages were included when one
examines the distribution; for groups like
Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages,
whole families of languages possess tonality
but simply have relatively few members, and
for some North American tone languages, multiple
independent origins are suspected.
If generally considering only complex-tone
vs. no-tone, it might be concluded that tone
is almost always an ancient feature within
a language family that is highly conserved
among members.
However, when considered in addition to "simple"
tone systems that include only two tones,
tone, as a whole, appears to be more labile,
appearing several times within Indo-European
languages, several times in American languages,
and several times in Papuan families.
That may indicate that rather than a trait
unique to some language families, tone is
a latent feature of most language families
that may more easily arise and disappear as
languages change over time.A 2015 study by
Caleb Everett argued that tonal languages
are more common in hot and humid climates,
which make them easier to pronounce, even
when considering familial relationships.
This is perhaps the first known case of influence
of the environment on the structure of the
languages spoken in it.
== 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 (high
tone may be assigned the numeral 1, 3, or
5, for example) and have not been adopted
for the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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 workaround).
The five IPA diacritics for level tones are
⟨ő ó ō ò ȍ⟩, with doubled high and
low diacritics for extra high and extra low.
The diacritics combined to form contour tones,
of which ⟨ô ǒ o᷄ o᷅ o᷆ o᷇ o᷈
o᷉⟩ have Unicode font support (support
for additional combinations is sparse).
Sometimes, a non-IPA vertical diacritic is
seen for a second higher mid tone, ⟨o̍⟩
so in a language with four or six level tones,
they may be transcribed ⟨ó o̍ ō ò⟩
or ⟨ő ó o̍ ō ò ȍ⟩.
A retired IPA system, sometimes still encountered,
traces the shape of the tone (the pitch trace)
before the syllable, where a stress mark would
go (e.g., ⟨ˆo ˇo ˉo ˊo ˋo ˗o ˴o ˍo
ˎo ˏo ˬo⟩).
For a more concrete example, take the Hanyu
Pinyin syllable [sa] used in Standard Chinese,
after applying the diacritics it becomes easier
to identify more specific rising and falling
tones: [ˆsa] (high peaking tone), [ˍsa]
(low level tone), etc.
It was used in combination with stress marks
to indicate intonation as well, as in English
[ˈgʊd ˌɑːftə`nuːn].
The most flexible system, based on the previous
spacing diacritics, is that of tone letters,
which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace
of the tone in question.
They are most commonly used for complex contour
systems, as in the languages of Liberia and
southern China.Very rarely, a tone letter
consists of more than three elements (peaking
or dipping tones), but occasionally, double-peaking
or double-dipping tones are encountered.
Reversed tone letters may be used for tone
sandhi, and dot-plus-bar tone letters for
neutral tones.
=== Africa ===
In African linguistics (as well as in many
African orthographies), a set of diacritics
is usual to mark tone.
The most common are a subset of the International
Phonetic Alphabet:
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: má (high),
ma (mid), mà (low).
Similarly, in some two-tone languages, only
one tone is marked explicitly, usually the
less common one.
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.
=== Asia ===
In the Chinese tradition, numerals are assigned
to various tones (see tone number).
For instance, Standard Mandarin Chinese, the
official language of China, 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 varieties 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 Chinese.
Depending on the dialect, each of these categories
may then be divided into two tones, typically
called yin and yang.
Typically, syllables carrying the ru tones
are closed by voiceless stops in Chinese varieties
that have such coda(s) so in such dialects,
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.
In 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 alternative to using the Chinese category
names is assigning to each category a numeral
ranging from 1 to 8, sometimes higher for
some Southern Chinese dialects with additional
tone splits.
Syllables belonging to the same tone category
differ drastically in actual phonetic tone
across the varieties of Chinese even among
dialects of the same group.
For example, the yin ping tone is a high level
tone in Beijing Mandarin Chinese but a low
level tone in Tianjin Mandarin Chinese.
More iconic systems use tone numbers or an
equivalent set of graphic pictograms known
as "Chao tone letters."
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 Chinese tones
are transcribed as follows (note that the
tone letters will not display properly without
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 Chinese,
for example, is not mid /3/.
However, it 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 varieties have
more than one rising or falling tone.
One common workaround 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.
Hangul included tone marks for Middle Korean
tones.
However, Gyeongsang Dialect Korean, which
is used in Southeastern regions of South Korea,
are known to have a strong influence coming
from tones.
Standard Central Thai has five tones–mid,
low, falling, high and rising–often indicated
respectively by the numbers zero, one, two,
three and four.
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
length, 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
six tones are marked by diacritics above or
below a certain vowel of each syllable.
In many words that end in diphthongs, however,
the vowel marked depends on the writer's style.
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.
That system enables Hmong speakers to type
their language with an ordinary Latin-letter
keyboard 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.
=== North America ===
Several North American languages have tone,
one of which is Cherokee, an Iroquoian language.
Oklahoma Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2
medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 5 rising and
6 falling).In Mesoamericanist linguistics,
/1/ stands for high tone and /5/ stands for
low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages
for which /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 two 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 five register tones
(Trique, Usila Chinantec) and others only
two (Matlatzinca and Chichimeca Jonaz).
Other languages in Mesoamerica that have tones
are Huichol, Yukatek Maya, the Tzotzil of
San Bartolo, Uspanteko, and one variety of
Huave.
=== South America ===
Many 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 register tones (the only other
languages in the Americas to have such a system
are Trique and Usila, mentioned above).
=== Europe ===
Swedish, Norwegian and Scots have simple word
tone systems, often called pitch accent (although
they are actually contour tones), appearing
only in words of two or more syllables.
Each word has a lexical tone, which varies
by dialect.
Words whose pronunciation differs only in
tone are frequently morphologically or etymologically
unrelated and may be spelled differently,
as in Norwegian cider ('cider'), sider ('sides').
The two word tones are conventionally called
tonelag; tonem 1 and tonem 2 in Norway and
acute accent and grave accent in Sweden.
In Norway, there are two major dialectal divisions
based on tone, roughly eastern and western/northern,
where the tones have different values: in
the east, T1 = level low, T2 = falling; in
the west/north, T1 = falling, T2 = rising-falling.
In Limburgish and Central Franconian dialects,
tones can also occur in monosyllabic words:
dáág ('day'), dáàg ('days').
Limburgish is typically a two-tone system,
distinguishing between level high and falling,
but the tones can be realized in other ways
depending on syntax, and some vowels diphthongize
or monophthongize under certain tones.
Depending on the dialect, Latvian has a two-,
three- or four-tone system.
== Orthographies ==
In Roman script orthographies, a number of
approaches are used.
Diacritics are common, as in pinyin, but they
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.
Tone may simply be ignored, as is possible
even for highly tonal languages: for example,
the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless
pinyin in government telegraph communications
for decades.
Likewise, Chinese reporters abroad may file
their stories in toneless pinyin.
Dungan, a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken
in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written
in orthographies that do not indicate tone.
Ndjuka, in which 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
× 5 × 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 of southern China
have nine contrastive tones, including contour
tones.
For example, the Kam language has 9 tones:
3 more-or-less fixed tones (high, mid and
low); 4 unidirectional tones (high and low
rising, high and low falling); and 2 bidirectional
tones (dipping and peaking).
This assumes that checked syllables are not
counted as having additional tones, as they
traditionally are in China.
For example, in the traditional reckoning,
the Kam language has 15 tones, but 6 occur
only in syllables closed with /p/, /t/ or
/k/, and the other 9 occur only in syllables
not ending in one of these sounds.
Preliminary work on the Wobe language of Liberia
and Côte d'Ivoire and the Chatino languages
of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects
may distinguish as many as fourteen tones,
but many linguists believe that many of these
will turn out to be sequences of tones or
prosodic effects.
== Origin ==
André-Georges Haudricourt 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: 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 separated
only 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 nontonal language, voiced consonants
commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced
at a lower pitch than other consonants.
That 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).
That happened in Punjabi: the Punjabi 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; at the
end, it left behind a high tone.
If there was no such consonant, the pitch
was unaffected; however, the unaffected words
are limited in pitch and did not interfere
with the low and high tones.
That produced a tone of its own, mid tone.
The historical connection is so regular that
Punjabi 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 Chinese.
Two of the three tones of Middle Chinese,
the "rising" and the "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 varieties descending from Middle Chinese
were further affected by a tone split in which
each tone divided 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).
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 are 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 *tuː ('water')
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 tense voice on the
preceding vowel, which tends to produce a
high F0, or 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 in which 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 one another 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 morphemes, leaving behind
a long falling tone.
Note that it has the reverse effect of the
postulated rising tone in Mandarin Chinese,
derived from a lost final glottal stop.
== See also ==
Meeussen's rule
Tone letter
Tone name
Tone number
Tone pattern
Musical language
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
