In linguistics, tone is a language's use of pitch contour, pitch register, or both to distinguish words' meanings or to serve a grammatical purpose. A particular tone is a musical pitch and its movement: whether held steady, or sliding upwards or downwards, or any complex combination of these. Simply worded, in certain languages, the tone of a given word or syllable is used to differentiate or inflect words. Some scholars also classify phonation, or changes in vocal cord vibrations, under the umbrella of tone.
All spoken languages use pitch to express emotion and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation. However, certain languages—tonal languages—additionally possess what linguists call tones: using pitch and changes-in-pitch specifically to distinguish words from each other, serving the same purpose that consonant and vowel sounds do in all languages. The basic distinctive tonal patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phonemes. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, such as in the various Thai and Chinese languages; most languages of Africa, such as in Hausa and Yoruba; and among some indigenous people of the Americas, such as in Navajo and Mexico's Oto-Manguean languages.
Tonal languages are classified separately from pitch-accent languages, such as Japanese, Western South Slavic languages, Baltic languages, and many Scandinavian language varieties, in that word-distinguishing pitch patterns affect nearly every syllable of a word in tonal languages but usually only one prominent syllable in pitch-accent languages.
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. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects.
Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! rowspan="2" | Tone name ! rowspan="2" | Tone ID ! rowspan="2" | Vni/telex/Viqr ! rowspan="2" | Description ! colspan="2" | Chao tone contour ! rowspan="2" | Diacritic ! rowspan="2" | Example |- ! Northern ! Southern |- | ngang "flat" | A1 | [default] | mid level | colspan="2" | (33) or (44) | style="text-align: center;" | ◌ | ma |- | huyền "deep" | A2 | 2 / f / ` | low falling (breathy) | colspan="2" | (31) or (21) | style="text-align: center;" | ◌̀ | mà |- | sắc "sharp" | B1 | 1 / s / ' | mid rising, tense | colspan="2" | (35) or (45) | style="text-align: center;" | ◌́ | má |- | nặng "heavy" | B2 | 5 / j / . | mid falling, glottalized, heavy | (3ˀ2ʔ) or (3ˀ1ʔ) | (12) or (212) | style="text-align: center;" |़ | mạ |- | hỏi "asking" | C1 | 3 / r / ? | mid falling(-rising), emphasis | (313) or (323) or (31) | rowspan="2" | (324) or (214) | style="text-align: center;" | ◌̉ | mả |- | ngã "tumbling" | C2 | 4 / x / ~ | mid rising, glottalized | (3ˀ5) or (4ˀ5) | style="text-align: center;" | ◌̃ | mã
Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels:
A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin ) A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ) 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 ) A short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ) 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 (/) 'mother' má (/) 'hemp' mǎ (/) 'horse' mà (/) 'scold' ma (/) (an interrogative particle)
These may be combined into a tongue-twister:
Simplified: Traditional: Pinyin: Māma mà mǎde má ma? IPA Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?'
See also one-syllable article.
A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is:
IPA: Translation: 'Does new silk burn?' A Vietnamese tongue twister:
IPA: Translation: 'Recently, you've been setting up the seven traps incorrectly.' A Cantonese tongue twister:
Jyutping: jat1 jan4 jan1 jat1 jat6 jan5 jat1 jan6 jat1 jan3 ji4 jan2 IPA: Translation: 'One person endures a day with one knife and one 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.
Phonation In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese, for example, the and tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the and tones are both low-falling, but the tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the 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. The tone register here should not be confused with register tone described in the next section.
Phonation type Gordon and Ladefoged established a continuum of phonation, where several types can be identified.
Relationship with tone Kuang identified two types of phonation: pitch-dependent and pitch-independent.Kuang, J.-J. (2013). Phonation in Tonal Contrasts (Doctoral dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles. Contrast of tones has long been thought of as differences in pitch height. However, several studies pointed out that tone is actually multidimensional. Contour, duration, and phonation may all contribute to the differentiation of tones. Investigations from the 2010s using perceptual experiments seem to suggest phonation counts as a perceptual cue.
Tone and pitch accent 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.
Tone and intonation Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as well as 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:
+Tone plus intonation in Thai Falling intonation Rising intonation Convoluted intonationHigh level tone Mid level tone Low level tone Falling tone Rising tone
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 rising intonation.
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.
Types Register tones and contour tones
In many Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other. 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).
Most tonal languages have a combination of register and contour tones. Tone is typical of languages including Kra–Dai, Vietic, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, 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.
Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, 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 (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone (usually in long vowels). 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 and other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa.
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.
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 Kru languages, each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese, Swedish, Norwegian 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.