In linguistics, tone is the use of pitch contour, pitch register, or both to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. In simple terms, a particular tone is the movement of a word or syllable's musical pitch: whether held steady, or sliding upwards or downwards, or any complex combination of these. Some scholars also classify phonation, or changes in vocal cord vibrations, under the umbrella of tone. All spoken languages use pitch to express emotion and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation. However, certain languages—tonal languages—additionally use tones to distinguish one word from another, just as consonant and vowel sounds do in all languages. The distinctive tonal patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and among indigenous people of the Americas. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages typically 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, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects. Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels:
A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin ⟨ā⟩) A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ⟨á⟩) A low tone with a slight fall (if there is no following syllable, it may start with a dip then rise to a high pitch): /à/ (pinyin ⟨ǎ⟩) A short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ⟨à⟩) A neutral tone, with no specific contour, used on weak syllables; its pitch depends chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable. These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription:
mā (媽/妈) 'mother' má (麻/麻) 'hemp' mǎ (馬/马) 'horse' mà (罵/骂) 'scold' ma (嗎/吗) (an interrogative particle) These may be combined into a tongue-twister:
Simplified: 妈妈骂马的麻吗? Traditional: 媽媽罵馬的麻嗎? Pinyin: Māma mà mǎde má ma? IPA /máma mâ màtə mǎ ma/ Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?' See also one-syllable article. A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is:
ไหมใหม่ไหม้มั้ย IPA: /mǎi̯ mài̯ mâi̯ mái̯/ Translation: 'Does new silk burn?' A Vietnamese tongue twister:
Bấy nay bây bầy bảy bẫy bậy. IPA: [ɓʌ̌i̯ nai̯ ɓʌi̯ ɓʌ̂i̯ ɓa᷉i̯ ɓʌ̌ˀi̯ ɓʌ̂ˀi̯] Translation: 'Recently, you've been setting up the seven traps incorrectly.' A Cantonese tongue twister:
一人因一日引一刃一印而忍 Jyutping: jat1 jan4 jan1 jat1 jat6 jan5 jat1 jan6 jat1 jan3 ji4 jan2 IPA: [jɐ́t̚ jɐ̏n jɐ́n jɐ́t̚ jɐ̀t̚ jɐ᷅n jɐ́t̚ jɐ̀n jɐ́t̚ jɐn jȉː jɐ᷄n] Translation: 'One person endures a day with one knife and one print.' Tone is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian. It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which is the case in Punjabi. Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.
Phonation In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese, for example, the ngã and sắc tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the nặng and huyền tones are both low-falling, but the nặng tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the huyền tone is longer and often has breathy voice. In some languages, such as Burmese, pitch and phonation are so closely intertwined that the two are combined in a single phonological system, where neither can be considered without the other. The distinctions of such systems are termed registers. 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. Contrast of tones has long been thought of as differences in pitch height. However, several studies pointed out that tone is actually multidimensional. Contour, duration, and phonation may all contribute to the differentiation of tones. Investigations from the 2010s using perceptual experiments seem to suggest phonation counts as a perceptual cue.
Tone and pitch accent Many languages use tone in a more limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent and whether a coherent definition is even possible.
Tone and intonation Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as well as sometimes by changes in phonation. Lexical tone coexists with intonation, with the lexical changes of pitch like waves superimposed on larger swells. For example, Luksaneeyanawin (1993) describes three intonational patterns in Thai: falling (with semantics of "finality, closedness, and definiteness"), rising ("non-finality, openness and non-definiteness") and "convoluted" (contrariness, conflict and emphasis). The phonetic realization of these intonational patterns superimposed on the five lexical tones of Thai (in citation form) are as follows:
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