![Six tones of Vietnamese language](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Six_tones_of_Vietnamese_language.png)
Tone is the use of
pitch in
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to
inflect
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and def ...
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 have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.
Tonal languages are different from
pitch-accent languages
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others.
Mechanics
Most languages use
pitch as
intonation to convey
prosody and
pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
has an inherent pitch contour, and thus
minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate th ...
s (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese by far has the most heavily studied tone system as well as amongst its various dialects. Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
![VietnameseToneNorthern](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/VietnameseToneNorthern.png)
:
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
, which has
five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels:
![Pinyin Tone Chart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Pinyin_Tone_Chart.svg)
# A high level tone: /á/ (
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
)
# 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
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin).
Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widel ...
, 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
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
transcription:
# ''mā'' (/) 'mother'
# ''má'' (/) 'hemp'
# ''mǎ'' (/) 'horse'
# ''mà'' (/) 'scold'
# ''ma'' (/) (an
interrogative particle
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who (pronoun), who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in ...
)
These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence:
:
Simplified:
:
Traditional
A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or ...
:
:Pinyin: ''Māma mà mǎde má ma?''
:IPA
:Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?'
A well-known
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 (or sung) word game. Additionally, they can be used as exercises to improve pronunciation and fluency. Some tongue twisters p ...
in Standard Thai is:
:
:IPA:
:Translation: 'Does new silk burn?'
A Vietnamese tongue twister:
:
:IPA:
:Translation: 'All along you've set up the seven traps incorrectly!'
A Cantonese tongue twister:
:
:
Jyutping
Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK), an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme. The LSHK advocates for ...
: ''jat
1 jan
4 jan
1 jat
1 jat
6 jan
5 jat
1 jan
6 jat
1 jan
3 ji
4 jan
2''
: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
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refer ...
syllabic consonant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacrit ...
s occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many
Bantu
Bantu may refer to:
*Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages
*Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language
* Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle
*Black Association for National ...
and
Kru languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
, but also occurs in
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
. 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
Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan
* Punjabi language
* Punjabi people
* Punjabi dialects and languages
Punjabi may also refer to:
* Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
.
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as
tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
.
Phonation
In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with
phonation
The term 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 defini ...
differences. In
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
, for example, the and tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having
glottalization
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...
in the middle. Similarly, the and tones are both low-falling, but the tone is shorter and pronounced with
creaky voice
In linguistics, creaky voice (sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry) refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which ...
at the end, while the tone is longer and often has
breathy voice
Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...
. In some languages, such as
Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
, 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. Recent investigations 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
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, 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
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
since they are reminiscent of
stress accent
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as ...
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:
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
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
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
The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, whereas marked syllables have high tone. In the related language
Sekani
Sekani or Tse’khene are a First Nations people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group in the Northern Interior of British Columbia. Their territory includes the Finlay and Parsnip River drainages of the Rocky Mountain Trench. The nei ...
, 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(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, stressed syllables have a lower pitch.
Types
Register tones and contour tones
In many
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The t ...
, 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
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
, 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
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
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
The Vietic languages are a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, spoken by the Vietic peoples in Laos and Vietnam. The branch was once referred to by the terms ''Việt–Mường'', ''Annamese–Muong'', and ''Vietnamuong''; the term '' ...
,
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
,
Afroasiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
,
Khoisan
Khoisan , or (), according to the contemporary Khoekhoegowab orthography, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the (formerly "Khoikhoi") and the or ( in t ...
,
Niger-Congo and
Nilo-Saharan
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. T ...
languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, such as
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
, 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
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
use contour tones, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a
contour
Contour may refer to:
* Contour (linguistics), a phonetic sound
* Pitch contour
* Contour (camera system), a 3D digital camera system
* Contour, the KDE Plasma 4 interface for tablet devices
* Contour line, a curve along which the function has a ...
), 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
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
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
MPI or Mpi may refer to:
Science and technology Biology and medicine
* Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique
* Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...
, 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
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
,
Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
, and
Kru languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
, each syllable may have a tone, whereas in
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
,
Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
,
Norwegian
Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to:
*Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe
*Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway
*Demographics of Norway
*The Norwegian language, including the ...
and many
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The t ...
, 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
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
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 tonethe 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.
Lexical tones and grammatical tones
Lexical tones are used to distinguish lexical meanings. Grammatical tones, on the other hand, change the
grammatical categories
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusiv ...
. To some authors, the term includes both inflectional and derivational morphology. Tian described a grammatical tone, the ''induced creaky tone'', in
Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
.
Number of tones
Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the
Chori language
The Kyoli or Cori (Chori) language is a Plateau language spoken in Southern Kaduna State, Nigeria.
Overview
It is spoken in the northeast of Nok in Jaba Local Government Area (LGA), Kaduna State. The speakers prefer to spell the name of their ...
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
The Kam–Sui languages () are a branch of the Kra–Dai 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 fou ...
of southern China have nine contrastive tones, including contour tones. For example, the
Kam language
The Kam language, also known as Gam (autonym: ''lix Gaeml''), or in Chinese, Dong or Tung-Chia, is a Kam–Sui language spoken by the Dong people. ''Ethnologue'' distinguishes three Kam varieties as separate but closely related languages.
Dia ...
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 syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
s are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. For example, in the traditional reckoning, the
Kam language
The Kam language, also known as Gam (autonym: ''lix Gaeml''), or in Chinese, Dong or Tung-Chia, is a Kam–Sui language spoken by the Dong people. ''Ethnologue'' distinguishes three Kam varieties as separate but closely related languages.
Dia ...
has 15 tones, but 6 occur only in syllables closed with the voiceless
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
s , or and the other 9 occur only in syllables not ending in one of these sounds.
Preliminary work on the
Wobe language (part of the Wee continuum) of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the
Ticuna language
Ticuna, or Tikuna, is a language spoken by approximately 50,000 people in the Amazon Basin, including the countries of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Ticuna people and is considered "stable" by ethnologue. Ticuna is g ...
of the Amazon and the
Chatino language
Chatino is a group of indigenous Mesoamerican languages. These languages are a branch of the Zapotecan family within the Oto-Manguean language family. They are natively spoken by 45,000 Chatino people,
whose communities are located in the sout ...
s of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more. The
Guere language
Guéré (Gere), also called Wè (Wee), is a Kru languages, Kru language spoken by over 300,000 people in the Dix-Huit Montagnes and Moyen-Cavally regions of Ivory Coast.
Phonology
The phonology of Guere (here the Zagna dialect of Central Guere ...
,
Dan language
Dan is a Southern Mande language spoken primarily in Ivory Coast (~800,000 speakers) and Liberia (150,000–200,000 speakers). There is also a population of about 800 speakers in Guinea
Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, G ...
and
Mano language
The Mano language, also known as Maa, Mah, and Mawe, is a significant Mande language of Liberia and Guinea. It is spoken primarily in Nimba County in north-central Liberia and in Nzérékoré, Lola
Lola may refer to:
Places
* Lolá, a or ...
of Liberia and Ivory Coast have around 10 tones, give or take. The
Oto-Manguean
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
languages of Mexico have a huge number of tones as well. The most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not east Asia.
Tonal change
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
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 ( pitch and rhythm contour). The abbreviation IU is used and therefore the full form is o ...
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 In phonetics, downdrift (also known as ''automatic downstep'') is the cumulative lowering of pitch in the course of a sentence due to interactions among tones in a tonal language. Downdrift often occurs when the tones in successive syllables are H ...
.
Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a
downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.
Two main kinds of downstep can be disting ...
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
In agriculture, a terrace is a piece of sloped plane that has been cut into a series of successively receding flat surfaces or platforms, which resemble steps, for the purposes of more effective farming. This type of landscaping is therefore ...
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
A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes.
An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language o ...
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 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 ('very') and 好 ('good') produce the phrase 很好 ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as .
Right- and left-dominant sandhi
Tone sandhi in
Sinitic languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...
can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of the word must take their sandhi form.
Taiwanese Southern Min is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam
5 'salty'; 酸sng
1 'sour'; 甜tinn
1 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam
7 sng
7 tinn
1 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone.
Tone change
Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi.
Tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however, is a morphologically conditioned
alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy.
Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern
Southern Min
Southern Min (), Minnan (Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan ( ...
are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes. Examples: 長 tng
5 'long' vs. tng
2 'grow'; 斷 tng
7 'break' vs. tng
2 'cause to break'. Also, 毒 in
Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations: to̍k (entering tone) means 'poison' or 'poisonous', while thāu (departing tone) means 'to kill with poison'. The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka.
Neutralisation
Uses of tone
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and
Hmong
Hmong may refer to:
* Hmong people, an ethnic group living mainly in Southwest China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand
* Hmong cuisine
* Hmong customs and culture
** Hmong music
** Hmong textile art
* Hmong language, a continuum of closely related ton ...
.
However, in many African languages, especially in the
Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the
Kru languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, which are inflected to indicate
tense and mood,
person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...
, and
polarity
Polarity may refer to:
Science
*Electrical polarity, direction of electrical current
*Polarity (mutual inductance), the relationship between components such as transformer windings
* Polarity (projective geometry), in mathematics, a duality of ord ...
, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go".
In colloquial
Yoruba
The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...
, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may
assimilate to each other, and consonants
elide
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run toget ...
so much 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 drum
The talking drum is an hourglass-shaped drum from West Africa, whose pitch can be regulated to mimic the tone and prosody of human speech. It has two drumheads connected by leather tension cords, which allow the player to change the pitc ...
s", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by
whistling
Whistling without the use of an artificial whistle is achieved by creating a small opening with one's lips, usually after applying moisture (licking one's lips or placing water upon them) and then blowing or sucking air through the space. The a ...
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) do tone languages occur 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
Caleb (), sometimes transliterated as Kaleb ( he, כָּלֵב, ''Kalev'', ; Tiberian vocalization: Kālēḇ; Academy of the Hebrew Language, Hebrew Academy: Kalev), is a figure who appears in the Hebrew Bible as a representative of the Tribe ...
argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If the conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it. The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars.
Tone and inflection
Tone has long been viewed as merely a phonological system. It was not until recent years that tone was found to play a role in
inflectional morphology
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
. Palancar and Léonard (2016) provided an example with Tlatepuzco
Chinantec
The Chinantec or Chinantecan languages constitute a branch of the Oto-Manguean family. Though traditionally considered a single language, ''Ethnologue'' lists 14 partially mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinantec.Palancar, Enrique L. (2014) ...
(an
Oto-Manguean language
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
spoken in Southern
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
), where tones are able to distinguish
mood,
person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...
, and
number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
:
In
Iau language
Iau (Iaw, Yau) or Turu is a Lakes Plain languages, Lakes Plain language of West Papua (region), West Papua, Indonesia, spoken by about 600 people. Most speakers are monolingual, and their number is growing. Other peoples in the western Lakes Pla ...
(the most tonally complex
Lakes Plain language
The Lakes Plain languages are a family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Lakes Plain of Indonesian New Guinea. They are notable for being heavily tonal and for their lack of nasal consonants.
Classification
The Lakes Plain languages were tenta ...
, predominantly monosyllabic), nouns have an inherent tone (e.g. be˧ 'fire' but be˦˧ 'flower'), but verbs don't have any inherent tone. For verbs, a tone is used to mark
aspect
Aspect or Aspects may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art
* Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company
* Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England
* ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...
. The first work that mentioned this was published in 1986. Example paradigms:
Tones are used to differentiate
cases as well, as in
Maasai language
Maasai (previously spelled ''Masai'') or Maa (; autonym: ''ɔl Maa'') is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 800,000. It is closely related to the other Maa varieties ...
(a
Nilo-Saharan language
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. T ...
spoken in
Kenya
)
, national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"()
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Nairobi
, coordinates =
, largest_city = Nairobi
, ...
and
Tanzania
Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands and ...
):
Certain
varieties of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
are known to express meaning by means of tone change although further investigations are required. Examples from two
Yue dialects
Yue () is a group of similar Sinitic languages spoken in Southern China, particularly in Liangguang (the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces).
The name Cantonese is often used for the whole group, but linguists prefer to reserve that name for ...
spoken in
Guangdong Province
Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...
are shown below.
[Chen, Matthew Y. (2000). ''Tone Sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects''. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.] In
Taishan __NOTOC__
Taishan may refer to:
*Mount Tai or Taishan (), Shandong, China
*Taishan District, Tai'an (), named after the Mount Tai, a district in Tai'an, Shandong, China
*Taishan, Guangdong (), a county-level city of Jiangmen, Guangdong, China
**Gre ...
, tone change indicates the grammatical number of personal pronouns. In Zhongshan,
perfective
The perfective aspect (abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imp ...
verbs are marked with tone change.
* Taishan
* Zhongshan
The following table compares the personal pronouns of Sixian dialect (a dialect of
Taiwanese Hakka
Taiwanese Hakka is a language group consisting of Hakka dialects spoken in Taiwan, and mainly used by people of Hakka ancestry. Taiwanese Hakka is divided into five main dialects: Sixian, Hailu, Dabu, Raoping, and Zhao'an. The most widely sp ...
) with Zaiwa and Jingpho (both
Tibeto-Burman languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak ...
spoken in
Yunnan
Yunnan , () is a landlocked Provinces of China, province in Southwest China, the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is ...
and
Burma
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...
). From this table, we find the distinction between nominative, genitive, and accusative is marked by tone change and
sound alternation.
Phonetic notation
There are several approaches to notating tones in the description of a language. A fundamental difference is between ''phonemic'' and ''phonetic'' transcription.
A phonemic notation will typically lack any consideration of the actual phonetic values of the tones. Such notations are especially common when comparing dialects with wildly different phonetic realizations of what are historically the same set of tones. In Chinese, for example, the "
four tones
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin).
Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widel ...
" may be assigned numbers, such as ① to ④ or – after the historical tone split that affected all Chinese languages to at least some extent – ① to ⑧ (with odd numbers for the ''yin'' tones and even numbers for the ''yang''). In traditional Chinese notation, the equivalent diacritics are attached to the
Chinese character
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the Written Chinese, writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are k ...
, marking the same distinctions, plus underlined for the ''yang'' tones where a split has occurred. If further splits occurred in some language or dialect, the results may be numbered '4a' and '4b' or something similar. Among the
Kradai languages, tones are typically assigned the letters A through D or, after a historical tone split similar to what occurred in Chinese, A1 to D1 and A2 to D2. (See
Proto-Tai language
Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language (common ancestor) of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly attested ...
.) With such a system, it can be seen which words in two languages have the same historical tone (say tone ③) even though they no longer sound anything alike.
Also phonemic are
upstep
In linguistics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Upstep is a much rarer phenomenon than its counterpart, downst ...
and
downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.
Two main kinds of downstep can be disting ...
, which are indicated by the IPA diacritics and , respectively, or by the typographic substitutes and , respectively. Upstep and downstep affect the tones within a language as it is being spoken, typically due to grammatical inflection or when certain tones are brought together. (For example, a high tone may be stepped down when it occurs after a low tone, compared to the pitch it would have after a mid tone or another high tone.)
Phonetic notation records the actual relative pitch of the tones. Since tones tend to vary over time periods as short as centuries, this means that the historical connections among the tones of two language varieties will generally be lost by such notation, even if they are dialects of the same language.
* The easiest notation from a typographical perspective – but one that is internationally ambiguous – is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned digits and each tone transcribed as a digit (or as a sequence of digits if a contour tone). Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic (high tone may be assigned the digit 1, 3, or 5, for example) and have therefore not been adopted for the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
. For instance, high tone is conventionally written with a 1 and low tone with a 4 or 5 when transcribing the
Kru languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
of Liberia, but with 1 for low and 5 for high for the
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ...
of Ethiopia. The tone in a Kru language is thus the same pitch contour as one written in an Omotic language. Pitch value 1 may be distinguished from tone number 1 by doubling it or making it superscript or both.
* For simple tone systems, a series of diacritics such as for high tone and for low tone may be practical. 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 , with doubled high and low diacritics for ''extra high'' and ''extra low'' (or 'top' and 'bottom'). The diacritics combine to form contour tones, of which have Unicode font support (support for additional combinations is sparse). Sometimes, a non-IPA vertical diacritic is seen for a second, higher mid tone, , so a language with four or six level tones may be transcribed or . For the
Chinantecan languages
The Chinantec or Chinantecan languages constitute a branch of the Oto-Manguean family. Though traditionally considered a single language, '' Ethnologue'' lists 14 partially mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinantec.Palancar, Enrique L. (2014 ...
of Mexico, the diacritics have been used, but they are a local convention not accepted by the IPA.
* A retired IPA system, sometimes still encountered, traces the ''shape'' of the tone (the
pitch trace
Pitch may refer to:
Acoustic frequency
* Pitch (music), the perceived frequency of sound including "definite pitch" and "indefinite pitch"
** Absolute pitch or "perfect pitch"
** Pitch class, a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octave ...
) before the syllable, where a stress mark would go (e.g., ). For a more concrete example, take the
Hanyu Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
syllable
aused in
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
, after applying the diacritics it becomes easier to identify more specific rising and falling tones: (high peaking tone), (low level tone), etc. It was used in combination with stress marks to indicate intonation as well, as in English (now transcribed ).
* The most flexible system, based on the previous spacing diacritics but with the addition of a stem (like the staff of musical notation), is that of the IPA-adopted
Chao tone letter
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.
__TOC__
Chao tone letters (IPA)
A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the ...
s, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. Because musical staff notation is international, there is no international ambiguity with the Chao/IPA tone letters: a line at the top of the staff is high tone, a line at the bottom is low tone, and the shape of the line is a schematic of the contour of the tone (as visible in a
pitch trace
Pitch may refer to:
Acoustic frequency
* Pitch (music), the perceived frequency of sound including "definite pitch" and "indefinite pitch"
** Absolute pitch or "perfect pitch"
** Pitch class, a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octave ...
). They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, such as those of the languages of Liberia and southern China.
:The Chao tone letters have two variants. The left-stem letters, , are used for
tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
. These are especially important for the
Min Chinese
Min (; BUC: ''Mìng-ngṳ̄'') is a broad group of Sinitic languages spoken by about 30 million people in Fujian province as well as by the descendants of Min speaking colonists on Leizhou peninsula and Hainan, or assimilated natives of Chaoshan ...
languages. For example, a word may be pronounced in isolation, but in a compound the tone will shift to . This can be notated morphophonemically as , where the back-to-front tone letters simultaneously show the underlying tone and the value in this word. Using the local (and internationally ambiguous) non-IPA numbering system, the compound may be written . Left-stem letters may also be combined to form contour tones.
:The second Chao letter variant are the dotted tone letters , which are used to indicate the pitch of
neutral tone
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin).
Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widel ...
s. These are phonemically null, and may be indicated with the digit '0' in a numbering system, but take specific pitches depending on the preceding phonemic tone. When combined with tone sandhi, the left-stem dotted tone letters are seen.
An IPA/Chao tone letter will rarely be composed of more than three elements (which are sufficient for peaking and dipping tones). Occasionally, however, peaking–dipping and dipping–peaking tones, which require four elements – or even double-peaking and double-dipping tones, which require five – are encountered. This is usually only the case when
prosody is superposed on lexical or grammatical tone, but a good computer font will allow an indefinite number of tone letters to be concatenated. The IPA diacritics placed over vowels and other letters have not been extended to this level of complexity.
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
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
:
Minor variations are common. In many three-tone languages, it is usual 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 two-tone languages, only one tone may be marked explicitly, usually the less common or more 'marked' tone (see
markedness
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
).
When digits are used, typically 1 is high and 5 is low, except in
Omotic languages
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ...
, where 1 is low and 5 or 6 is high. In languages with just two tones, 1 may be high and 2 low, etc.
Asia
In the Chinese tradition, digits are assigned to various tones (see
tone number
Tone numbers are numerical digits used like letters to mark the tones of a language. The number is usually placed after a romanized syllable. Tone numbers are defined for a particular language, so they have little meaning between languages.
Othe ...
). For instance,
Standard Mandarin Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...
, the official language of China, has four lexically contrastive tones, and the digits 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
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
(see
Four tones
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin).
Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widel ...
); 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 syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
s as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. In
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
, 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 digit 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
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
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 letter
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.
__TOC__
Chao tone letters (IPA)
A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the ...
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
A tone contour, or contour tone, 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, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khois ...
is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin Chinese tones are transcribed as follows (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/ = or simply . If a distinction is made, it may be that is mid tone in a register system and is mid level tone in a contour system, or may be mid tone on a short syllable or a mid
checked tone
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a syl ...
, while is mid tone on a long syllable or a mid unchecked tone.
IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising and falling , 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 and for high-rising (e.g. ) and high-falling (e.g. ) tones and to use the subscript diacritics and for low-rising (e.g. ) and low-falling (e.g. ) tones.
North America
Several North American languages have tone, one of which is
Cherokee
The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
, an
Iroquoian language
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...
. Oklahoma Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 5 rising and 6 falling).
The
Tanoan languages
Tanoan , also Kiowa–Tanoan or Tanoan–Kiowa, is a family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples in present-day New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Most of the languages – Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa), Tewa, and Towa – a ...
have tone as well. For instance,
Kiowa
Kiowa () people are a Native American tribe and an indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries,Pritzker 326 and eve ...
has three tones (high, low, falling), while
Jemez has four (high, mid, low, and falling).
In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for high tone and /5/ stands for low tone, except in
Oto-Manguean
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
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 or after a vowel to indicate low tone. The
Southern Athabascan languages
Southern Athabaskan (also Apachean) is a subfamily of Athabaskan languages spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States (including Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah) with two outliers in Oklahoma and Texas. The language is spoken to a ...
that include the
Navajo
The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
and
Apache languages
Southern Athabaskan (also Apachean) is a subfamily of Athabaskan languages spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States (including Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah) with two outliers in Oklahoma and Texas. The language is spoken to a ...
are tonal, and are analyzed as having two tones: high and low. One variety of
Hopi
The Hopi are a Native American ethnic group who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. As of the 2010 census, there are 19,338 Hopi in the country. The Hopi Tribe is a sovereign nation within the Unite ...
has developed tone, as has the
Cheyenne language
The Cheyenne language (, ) (informal spelling Tsisinstsistots), is the 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 fami ...
.
Tone orthographies
In Roman script orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
, but they tend to be omitted.
[ ]Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA
The Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) or Hmong RPA (also Roman Popular Alphabet), is a system of romanization for the various dialects of the Hmong language. Created in Laos between 1951 and 1953 by a group of missionaries and Hmong advisers, it ha ...
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 Dungan may refer to:
* Donegan, an Irish surname, sometimes spelled Dungan
* Dungan people, a group of Muslim people of Hui origin
** Dungan language
** Dungan, sometimes used to refer to Hui Chinese people generally
* Dungan Mountains in Sibi Dist ...
, a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone.[''Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform'']
/ref> 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.
Standard Central Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
has five tones–mid, low, falling, high and rising–often indicated respectively by the numbers zero, one, two, three and four. The Thai alphabet
The Thai script ( th, อักษรไทย, ) is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai alphabet itself (as used to write Thai) has 44 consonant symbols ( th, พยัญชน ...
is an alphasyllabary
An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel nota ...
, 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. The Shan alphabet
The Shan alphabet is a Brahmic abugida, used for writing the Shan language, which was derived from the Burmese alphabet. Due to its recent reforms, the Shan alphabet is more phonetic than other Burmese-derived alphabets.
History
Until the 196 ...
, derived from the Burmese script
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (horse), a ...
, has five tone letters: , , , , ; a sixth tone is unmarked.
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
uses the Latin alphabet and its six tones are marked by letters with diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s above or below a certain vowel. Basic notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:
The Latin-based Hmong
Hmong may refer to:
* Hmong people, an ethnic group living mainly in Southwest China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand
* Hmong cuisine
* Hmong customs and culture
** Hmong music
** Hmong textile art
* Hmong language, a continuum of closely related ton ...
and Iu Mien
The Iu Mien language ( ium, Iu Mienh, ; zh, 勉語 or ; th, ภาษาอิวเมี่ยน) is the language spoken by the Iu Mien people in China (where they are considered a constituent group of the Yao peoples), Laos, Vietnam, Th ...
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 Iu Mien language ( ium, Iu Mienh, ; zh, 勉語 or ; th, ภาษาอิวเมี่ยน) is the language spoken by the Iu Mien people in China (where they are considered a constituent group of the Yao peoples), Laos, Vietnam, Th ...
, the letters ''v, c, h, x, z'' indicate tones but unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.
The Standard Zhuang
Standard Zhuang (autonym: , , (pre-1982: ; Sawndip: ); ) is the official standardized form of the Zhuang languages, which are a branch of the Northern Tai languages. Its pronunciation is based on that of the Yongbei Zhuang dialect of Shuangq ...
and Zhuang languages
The Zhuang languages (; autonym: , pre-1982: , Sawndip: 話僮, from ''vah'', 'language' and ''Cuengh'', 'Zhuang'; ) are any of more than a dozen Tai languages spoken by the Zhuang people of Southern China in the province of Guangxi and adjacen ...
used to use a unique set of six "tone letters" based on the shapes of numbers, but slightly modified, to depict what tone a syllable was in. This was replaced in 1982 with the use of normal letters in the same manner, like Hmong.
The syllabary of the Nuosu language
Nuosu or Nosu (, transcribed as ), also known as Northern Yi, Liangshan Yi, and Sichuan Yi, is the prestige language of the Yi people; it has been chosen by the Chinese government as the standard Yi language () and, as such, is the only one taug ...
depicts tone in a unique manner, having separate glyphs for each tone other than for the mid-rising tone, which is denoted by the addition of a diacritic. Take the difference between ꉬ nge ɯ³³, and ꉫ ngex ɯ³⁴ In romanisation, the letters t, x, and p are used to demarcate tone. As codas are forbidden in Nuosu there is no ambiguity.
Origin and development
André-Georges Haudricourt
André-Georges Haudricourt (; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.
Biography
He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technolo ...
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 Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a no ...
.
Tone as an areal feature
Tone is sometimes an areal rather than a phylogenetic
In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups o ...
feature. That is to say, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighbouring languages are tonal or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question and bring their tones with them. The process is referred to as contact-induced tonogenesis by linguists. In other cases, tone may arise spontaneously and surprisingly fast: the dialect of Cherokee
The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not although they were separated only in 1838.
In world languages
Tone arose in the Athabascan languages
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...
at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo
The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
, syllables with glottalized consonants (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey
The Slavey (also Slave and South Slavey) are a First Nations indigenous peoples of the Dene group, indigenous to the Great Slave Lake region, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and extending into northeastern British Columbia and northwestern ...
, 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
The Koyukon (russian: Коюконы) are an Alaska Native Athabascan people of the Athabascan-speaking ethnolinguistic group. Their traditional territory is along the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers where they subsisted for thousands of years by ...
) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa
Hupa (Yurok language term: Huep'oola' / Huep'oolaa = "Hupa people") are a Native American people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group in northwestern California. Their endonym is Natinixwe, also spelled Natinook-wa, meaning "Peopl ...
), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word ' ('water') is toneless ' in Hupa, high-tone ' in Navajo, and low-tone ''tù'' in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan ' ('knee') is toneless ' in Hupa, low-tone ' in Navajo, and high-tone ' in Slavey. provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either tense voice
The term stiff voice describes the pronunciation of consonants or vowels with a glottal opening narrower, and the vocal folds stiffer, than occurs in modal voice. Although there is no specific International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA diacritic for stif ...
on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high F0, or creaky voice
In linguistics, creaky voice (sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry) refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which ...
, 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
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The t ...
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
The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language f ...
developed tone independently of one another and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne
The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enroll ...
, Arapaho
The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
By the 1850s, Arapaho band ...
, 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 acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.
In Mohawk Mohawk may refer to:
Related to Native Americans
*Mohawk people, an indigenous people of North America (Canada and New York)
*Mohawk language, the language spoken by the Mohawk people
*Mohawk hairstyle, from a hairstyle once thought to have been t ...
, a glottal stop can disappear in a combination of morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s, leaving behind a long falling tone. Note that it has the reverse effect of the postulated rising tone in Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
or Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
, derived from a lost final glottal stop.
In Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
, a 2013 study which compared voice recordings of Seoul speech from 1935 and 2005 found that in recent years, lenis consonants (ㅂㅈㄷㄱ), aspirated consonant
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with the ...
s (ㅍㅊㅌㅋ) and fortis consonants (ㅃㅉㄸㄲ) were shifting from a distinction via voice onset time
In phonetics, voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, accor ...
to that of pitch change, and suggests that the modern Seoul dialect
The Gyeonggi dialect () or Seoul dialect () of the Korean language is the prestige dialect of the language and the basis of the standardized form used in South Korea. It is spoken throughout the Korean Peninsula and in the Korean diaspora, but i ...
is currently undergoing tonogenesis. These sound shifts still show variations among different speakers, suggesting that the transition is still ongoing. Among 141 examined Seoul speakers, these pitch changes were originally initiated by females born in the 1950s, and has almost reached completion in the speech of those born in the 1990s.
Tonogenesis
Triggers of tonogenesis
"There is tonogenetic potential in various series of phonemes: glottalized vs. plain consonants, unvoiced vs. voiced, aspirated vs. unaspirated, geminates vs. simple (...), and even among vowels". Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss
Loss may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* ''Loss'' (Bass Communion album) (2006)
* ''Loss'' (Mull Historical Society album) (2001)
*"Loss", a song by God Is an Astronaut from their self-titled album (2008)
* Losses "(Lil Tjay son ...
or merger
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...
of consonants. In a nontonal language, voiced consonant
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refer ...
s 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 previously carried (a process called transphonologization
In historical linguistics, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see below) is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contrast ...
) and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
).
This process happened in the Punjabi language
Punjabi (; ; , ), sometimes spelled Panjabi, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. It has approximately 113 million native speakers.
Punjabi is the most widely-spoken first language in Pakistan, with 80.5 m ...
: the Punjabi murmured
Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...
(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 fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken to 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
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
, the "rising" and the "departing" tones, arose as the Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
final consonants and 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
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbou ...
in which each tone divided in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced. Vowels following a voiced consonant (depressor consonant
A depressor consonant is a consonant that depresses (lowers) the tone of its or a neighboring syllable. This is a consequence of the phonation (type of voicing) of the consonant. The Nguni languages of South Africa are well known for the lowering ...
) 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 or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
.
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.
Stages of tonogenesis
1. The table below is the process of tonogenesis in White Hmong
Hmong / Mong (; RPA: ''Hmoob,'' ; Nyiakeng Puachue: ; Pahawh: , ) is a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmongic languages spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Hainan, northern Vietnam, Thailand, ...
, described by Martha Ratliff
Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.
Ratliff earned a B.A. in English from ...
. The tone values described in the table are from Christina Esposito.
2. The table below shows the Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
tonogenesis. The tone values are taken from James Kirby.
3. The table below is the tonogenesis of Tai Dam
The Tai Dam (Tai Dam: , lo, ໄຕດຳ, th, ไทดำ) are an ethnic minority predominantly from China, northwest Vietnam, Laos, Thailand. They are part of the Tai peoples and ethnically similar to the Thai from Thailand, the Lao from Laos ...
(Black Tai). Displayed in the first row is the Proto-Southern Kra-Dai, as reconstructed by Norquest. Tone values are taken from Pittayaporn.
4. The table below shows the Chinese language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the wor ...
tonogenesis.
The tone values are listed below:
#SC= Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
(Putonghua)
#TSH= Taiwanese Sixian Hakka
#THH= Taiwanese Hailu Hakka
#XMM= Xiamen Min (Amoy)
#FZM= Fuzhou Min
#SZW= Suzhou Wu
#SXW= Shaoxing Wu
The tones across all varieties
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
(or dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...
s) of Chinese correspond to each other, although they may not correspond to each other perfectly. Moreover, listed above are citation tones, but in actual conversations, obligatory sandhi
Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
rules will reshape them. The Sixian and Hailu Hakka in Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...
are famous for their near-regular and opposite pattern (of pitch height). Both will be compared with Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
below.
#H: high; M: mid; L: low;
#L: level; R: rising; F: falling
5. The table below shows Punjabi tonogenesis in bisyllabic words. Unlike the above four examples, Punjab was not under the east Asian tone sprachbund
A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...
, instead belonging to a separate one in its own area of Punjab. As well, unlike the above languages, which developed tone from syllable endings, Punjab developed tone from its voiced aspirated stops losing their aspiration. Tone does occur in monosyllabic words as well, but are not discussed in the chart below.
(C = any consonant, T = non-retroflex stop, R = retroflex stop; C̬ = voiced, C̥ = unvoiced; Cʰ = aspirated; V = Neutral tone, V́ = Rising tone, V̀ = Falling tone)
List of tonal languages
Africa
Most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is, geographically, the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lies south of the Sahara. These include West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the List of sov ...
are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal; notable exceptions are Swahili (in the southeast), most languages spoken in the Senegambia
The Senegambia (other names: Senegambia region or Senegambian zone,Barry, Boubacar, ''Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade'', (Editors: David Anderson, Carolyn Brown; trans. Ayi Kwei Armah; contributors: David Anderson, American Council of Le ...
(among them Wolof
Wolof or Wollof may refer to:
* Wolof people, an ethnic group found in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania
* Wolof language, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania
* The Wolof or Jolof Empire, a medieval West African successor of the Mal ...
, Serer and Cangin languages
The Cangin languages are spoken by 200,000 people (as of 2007) in a small area east of Dakar, Senegal. They are the languages spoken by the Serer people who do not speak the Serer language (''Serer-Sine''). Because the people are ethnically Ser ...
), and Fulani
The Fula, Fulani, or Fulɓe people ( ff, Fulɓe, ; french: Peul, links=no; ha, Fulani or Hilani; pt, Fula, links=no; wo, Pël; bm, Fulaw) are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Sahel and West Africa, widely dispersed across the region. ...
. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal (Chadic
The Chadic languages form a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken in parts of the Sahel. They include 150 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, the Central African Republic, and northern Cam ...
, Omotic
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ...
) and nontonal ( Semitic, Berber
Berber or Berbers may refer to:
Ethnic group
* Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa
* Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages
Places
* Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile
People with the surname
* Ady Berber (1913–196 ...
, Egyptian
Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt.
Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to:
Nations and ethnic groups
* Egyptians, a national group in North Africa
** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...
, and most Cushitic
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...
) branches. All three Khoisan
Khoisan , or (), according to the contemporary Khoekhoegowab orthography, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the (formerly "Khoikhoi") and the or ( in t ...
language families—Khoe
Maharishi International University (MIU), formerly Maharishi University of Management, is a private university in Fairfield, Iowa. It was founded in 1973 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and features a "consciousness-based education" system that include ...
, Kx'a and Tuu—are tonal. All languages of the Nilotic language family are tonal.
Asia
Numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
and Mainland Southeast Asia
Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula or Indochina, is the continental portion of Southeast Asia. It lies east of the Indian subcontinent and south of Mainland China and is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west an ...
. Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
(including Meitei-Lon
Meitei (), also known as Manipuri (, ), is a Tibeto-Burman language of north-eastern India. It is spoken by around 1.8 million people, predominantly in the state of Manipur, but also by smaller communities in the rest of the country and in pa ...
, Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
, Mog and most varieties of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
; though some, such as Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
, are only marginally tonal) and Kra–Dai languages
The Kra–Dai languages (also known as Tai–Kadai and Daic) are a language family in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. All languages in the family are tonal languages, including Thai and Lao, the national languages o ...
(including Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and Lao) are mostly tonal. The Hmong–Mien languages
The Hmong–Mien languages (also known as Miao–Yao and rarely as Yangtzean) are a highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunn ...
are some of the most tonal languages in the world, with as many as twelve phonemically distinct tones. Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The te ...
(such as Khmer and Mon
Mon, MON or Mon. may refer to:
Places
* Mon State, a subdivision of Myanmar
* Mon, India, a town in Nagaland
* Mon district, Nagaland
* Mon, Raebareli, a village in Uttar Pradesh, India
* Mon, Switzerland, a village in the Canton of Grisons
* An ...
) and Austronesian (such as Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
, Javanese, Tagalog, and Maori) languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî, Paicî, Drubea, Numèè, Kwenyii, Matbat, Bukawa, Yabem, Ma'ya, and Tsat. Tones in Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
and Tsat may result from Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...
influence on both languages. There were tones in Middle Korean
Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding in 1600 to the Modern period.
The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 91 ...
. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, and Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
belong to language families that do not contain any tonality as defined here. In South Asia tonal languages are rare, but some Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
have tonality, including Punjabi
Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan
* Punjabi language
* Punjabi people
* Punjabi dialects and languages
Punjabi may also refer to:
* Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
and Dogri
Dogri (Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prade ...
, as well as the Eastern Bengali
Eastern Bengali or Vaṅga ( bn, বঙ্গ, bôṅgô)is a Nonstandard dialect, nonstandard dialect cluster of Bengali language, Bengali spoken in most of Bangladesh and Tripura, thus covering majority of the land of Bengal and surrounding are ...
lects.
America
A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...
of Alaska
Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...
and the American Southwest
The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that generally includes Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent portions of California, Colorado, N ...
(including Navajo
The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
), and the Oto-Manguean languages
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec
Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic commu ...
(with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil
The Tzotzil are an indigenous Maya people of the central Chiapas highlands in southern Mexico. As cited by Alfredo López Austin (1997), p. 133, 148 and following. As of 2000, they numbered about 298,000. The municipalities with the largest Tzo ...
have developed tone systems. The Ticuna language
Ticuna, or Tikuna, is a language spoken by approximately 50,000 people in the Amazon Basin, including the countries of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Ticuna people and is considered "stable" by ethnologue. Ticuna is g ...
of the western Amazon is perhaps the most tonal language of the Americas. Other languages of the western Amazon have fairly simple tone systems as well. 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.
Europe
Norwegian and Swedish share tonal language features via the 'Single' and 'Double' tone, which can be marked in phonetic descriptions by either a preceding ' (single tone) or ៴ (double tone). Examples in Norwegian: 'bønder (farmers) and ៴bønner (beans) are, apart from the intonation, phonetically identical (despite the spelling difference). Similarly, and with in this case identical spelling, 'tømmer (timber) and ៴tømmer (present tense of verb tømme – to empty) are distinguished only through intonation.
The single tone starts low and rises to a high note towards the end of the word, while the double tone starts higher than the single tone, falls, and then rises again to a higher pitch than the start.
Summary
Languages that are tonal include:
* Over 50% of the Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
. All Sinitic languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...
(most prominently, the Chinese languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...
), some Tibetic languages
The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries).Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptiv ...
, including the standard languages of Tibet
Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa people, ...
and Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...
, and Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
.
* In the Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The te ...
family, Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
and other members of the Vietic languages
The Vietic languages are a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, spoken by the Vietic peoples in Laos and Vietnam. The branch was once referred to by the terms ''Việt–Mường'', ''Annamese–Muong'', and ''Vietnamuong''; the term ''V ...
family are tonal. Other branches of this family, such as Mon
Mon, MON or Mon. may refer to:
Places
* Mon State, a subdivision of Myanmar
* Mon, India, a town in Nagaland
* Mon district, Nagaland
* Mon, Raebareli, a village in Uttar Pradesh, India
* Mon, Switzerland, a village in the Canton of Grisons
* An ...
, Khmer, and the Munda languages
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language famil ...
, are entirely non-tonal.
* Some of the Malayo-Polynesian
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...
branch of Austronesian languages in New Caledonia
)
, anthem = ""
, image_map = New Caledonia on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg
, map_alt = Location of New Caledonia
, map_caption = Location of New Caledonia
, mapsize = 290px
, subdivision_type = Sovereign st ...
(such as Paicî and Cèmuhî) and New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea).
It is a simplified version of ...
(such as Mor
Mor or MOR may refer to:
Names and titles
* Mór (given name), a list of people named Mór or Mor
* Mor (surname), a list of people named Mor or Mór
* Mor (honorific), or Mar, in Syriac
Radio and television
* Middle of the road (music) genre
* ...
, Ma'ya and Matbat) plus some of the Chamic languages
The Chamic languages, also known as Aceh–Chamic and Achinese–Chamic, are a group of ten languages spoken in Aceh (Sumatra, Indonesia) and in parts of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Hainan, China. The Chamic languages are a subgroup of Mala ...
such as Tsat in Hainan
Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly l ...
are tonal.
* The entire Kra–Dai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and including Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and Lao, is tonal.
* The entire Hmong–Mien family is highly tonal.
* Many Afroasiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
in the Chadic and Omotic branches have tone systems, including Hausa
Hausa may refer to:
* Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa
* Hausa language, spoken in West Africa
* Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states
* Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse
See also
* ...
.
* The vast majority of Niger–Congo languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of ...
, such as Ewe, Igbo
Igbo may refer to:
* Igbo people, an ethnic group of Nigeria
* Igbo language, their language
* anything related to Igboland, a cultural region in Nigeria
See also
* Ibo (disambiguation)
* Igbo mythology
* Igbo music
* Igbo art
*
* Igbo-Ukwu, a t ...
, Lingala
Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in ...
, Maninka
Maninka (also known as Malinke), or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande language family. It is the mother tongue of the Malinké peop ...
, Yoruba
The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...
, and the Zulu, have tone systems. The Kru languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...
and Southern Mande languages
The Southern Mande languages (called 'Southeastern Mande' in Kastenholz, who calls the superior Southeastern Mande node 'Eastern') are a branch of the Mande languages spoken across Ivory Coast and into Liberia.
Member languages
*Beng
*Dan
* Gban ...
have the most complex. Notable non-tonal Niger–Congo languages are Swahili, Fula
Fula may refer to:
*Fula people (or Fulani, Fulɓe)
*Fula language (or Pulaar, Fulfulde, Fulani)
**The Fula variety known as the Pulaar language
**The Fula variety known as the Pular language
**The Fula variety known as Maasina Fulfulde
*Al-Fula
...
, and Wolof
Wolof or Wollof may refer to:
* Wolof people, an ethnic group found in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania
* Wolof language, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania
* The Wolof or Jolof Empire, a medieval West African successor of the Mal ...
.
* All Nilotic languages
The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples.
Etymology
The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa.
Dem ...
such as the Dinka language
Dinka (natively , or simply ) is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are several main varieties, Padang, Rek, Agaar, Bor, Hol, Twic East, Twic, which are distinct enough (though m ...
, the Maa languages
The Maa languages are a group of closely related Eastern Nilotic languages (or from a linguistic perspective, dialects, as they appear to be mutually intelligible) spoken in parts of Kenya and Tanzania by more than a million speakers. They are s ...
, the Luo languages
The dozen Luo, Lwo or Lwoian languages are spoken by the Luo peoples in an area ranging from southern Sudan to western Ethiopia to southern Kenya, with Dholuo extending into northern Tanzania and Alur into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ...
and Kalenjin languages
The Kalenjin languages are a family of a dozen Southern Nilotic languages spoken in Kenya, eastern Uganda and northern Tanzania. The term Kalenjin comes from an expression meaning "I say (to you)" or "I have told you" (present participle tense). ' ...
have tone systems.
* All Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of th ...
in southern Africa have tone systems; some languages like Sandawe have tone systems like that of Cantonese.
* Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...
, such as Navajo
The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
, have tone systems (languages in California and 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
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian la ...
like Mohawk Mohawk may refer to:
Related to Native Americans
*Mohawk people, an indigenous people of North America (Canada and New York)
*Mohawk language, the language spoken by the Mohawk people
*Mohawk hairstyle, from a hairstyle once thought to have been t ...
commonly have tone; the Cherokee language
200px, Number of speakers
Cherokee or Tsalagi ( chr, ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, ) is an endangered-to-moribund Iroquoian language and the native language of the Cherokee people. ''Ethnologue'' states that there were 1,520 Cherokee speaker ...
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; Cherokee phonotactics permit only syllables of the structure (s)(C)V.
* All Oto-Manguean languages
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
are tonal. In some cases, as with Mixtec
The Mixtecs (), or Mixtecos, are indigenous Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico inhabiting the region known as La Mixteca of Oaxaca and Puebla as well as La Montaña Region and Costa Chica Regions of the state of Guerrero. The Mixtec Culture wa ...
, tone system variations between dialects are sufficiently great to cause mutual unintelligibility.
* The Ticuna language
Ticuna, or Tikuna, is a language spoken by approximately 50,000 people in the Amazon Basin, including the countries of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Ticuna people and is considered "stable" by ethnologue. Ticuna is g ...
of the western Amazon is strongly tonal. Various Arawakan languages
Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Branc ...
have relatively basic tone systems.
* Many languages of New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea).
It is a simplified version of ...
like Siane possess register tone systems.
* Some Indo-European languages (notably Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
, Norwegian
Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to:
*Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe
*Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway
*Demographics of Norway
*The Norwegian language, including the ...
, Latvian, and Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
) as well as others possess what is termed pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
, 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 language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
s, such as Krio,[Finney, Malcolm. 2004. Tone assignment on lexical items of English and African origin in Krio. In Escure, Genevieve & Schwegler, Armin (eds.), Creoles, contact and language change: Linguistics and social implications, 221–236. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.] Saramaccan
Saramaccan () is a creole language spoken by about 58,000 ethnic African people near the Saramacca and the upper Suriname River, as well as in Paramaribo, capital of Suriname (formerly also known as Dutch Guiana). The language also has 25,000 s ...
and Papiamento
Papiamento () or Papiamentu (; nl, Papiaments) is a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean. It is the most widely spoken language on the Caribbean ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao), with official status in Arub ...
, have tone from their African substratum
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...
languages.
In some cases it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. For example, the Ket language
The Ket language, or more specifically ''Imbak'' and formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak , is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family. It is spoken along the middle Yenisei ba ...
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
The term 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 defini ...
(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
A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...
Solresol
Solresol (Solfège: Sol- Re- Sol), originally called Langue universelle and then Langue musicale universelle, is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. His major book on it, ''Langue Musicale Universelle'', was p ...
can consist of only tone, but unlike all natural tonal languages, Solresol's tone is absolute, rather than relative, and no tone sandhi occurs.
See also
* Meeussen's rule Meeussen's rule is 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 (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon ...
* Tone letter
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.
__TOC__
Chao tone letters (IPA)
A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the ...
* Tone name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use.
*In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4. They are descended from but not identical to the historical four tones of Midd ...
* Tone number
Tone numbers are numerical digits used like letters to mark the tones of a language. The number is usually placed after a romanized syllable. Tone numbers are defined for a particular language, so they have little meaning between languages.
Othe ...
* Tone pattern
Tone patterns () are common constraints in classical Chinese poetry.
The four tones of Middle Chinese—''level'' (平), ''rising'' (上), ''departing'' (去), and ''entering'' (入) tones—are categorized into level (平) tones and oblique (仄 ...
* Musical language
Musical languages are constructed languages based on musical sounds, which tend to incorporate articulation. Unlike tonal languages, focused on stress, and whistled languages, focused on pitch bends, musical languages distinguish pitches or rhyt ...
* Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" () is a short narrative poem written in Classical Chinese that is composed of about 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced ''shi'' () when read in present-day Standa ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
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* HAL 01678018.
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* Reprinted (with additions).
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** Translation of .
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* (Reprinted 1972, ).
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* (pbk).
External links
World map of tone languages
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tone (Linguistics)
Linguistics terminology