Tone (linguistics)

Categories: Section stubs | Phonology

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, contrast, emotion, or other such nuances, but not every language uses tone to distinguish lexical meaning. When this occurs, tones are phonemes (discrete speech sounds), just like consonants and vowels, and they are occasionally referred to as tonemes.

Languages that make use of tonemes are called tonal languages. A slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal. However, most Indo-European languages, which include the majority of the most widely-spoken languages in the world today, are not tonal.

Tonal languages

Languages that are tonal include:

• Some of the Sino-Tibetan languages, including the numerically most important ones. All of the Chinese "dialects" (languages) are strongly tonal; while some of the Tibetan languages, including the standard languages of Lhasa and Bhutan, and Burmese are more marginally tonal. However Nepal Bhasa, the original language of Kathmandu, is non-tonal, as are several Tibetan dialects and many or most of the other Tibeto-Burman languages.
• In the Austro-Asiatic family, Vietnamese and its closest relatives are strongly tonal. Other languages of this family, such as Mon, Khmer, and the Munda languages, are non-tonal.
  • Vietnamese and its close relative, the Muong language, can also be classified in the seperate Vietic languages family, along with eight other languages, all of which are tonal.
• The entire Tai-Kadai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.
• The entire Miao-Yao family.
• Many Afro-Asiatic languages in the Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic families, such as Chadic Hausa, although Cushitic Somali and many others have pitch-accent systems. Many of the Omotic tone systems are quite complex.
• The great majority of Niger-Congo languages, such as Ewe, Malinké, Yoruba, Lingala, and the Nguni languages, have register-tone systems. The Bantu languages fall into two groups with tones that are mirror images of each other. Many of the Kru systems are quite complex. Notable non-tonal languages are Swahili and Wolof.
• Possibly all Nilo-Saharan languages.
• All Khoisan languages in southern Africa have contour-tone systems.
• Many of the Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo and the other Apachean languages have register-tone systems, but the languages that have tone fall into two groups that are mirror images of each other.
• The majority of Oto-Manguean languages, such as Mazatec.
• The Kiowa-Tanoan languages.
• Scattered languages of the Amazon basin.
• Scattered languages of New Guinea.
• Some supposedly European-based creoles, such as Saramaccan, have tones from their African substratum languages.

The vast majority of Austronesian languages are non-tonal, but a small number have developed tone systems. No tonal language has been reported from Australia. With other languages we simply don't know. For example, the Ket language has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, but to have no tone at all by others. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation (creaky, murmured, or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone. Something similar appears to be the case for Ket as well.

Some Indo-European languages are usually characterized as tonal, such as Lithuanian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Limburgish, Swedish and Norwegian, but they are at best marginally so. However, Punjabi is a clearly tonal language where the tones arose as a reinterpretation of a consonant series in terms of pitch, but as they did in China. Both Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit had tonic accents, but they were marginally tonal in the sense that only rarely could the meaning of an utterance be changed by changing a tone. A famous example of such a case is from Aristophanes' Frogs, where he refers to an actual occurrence at the performance of Sophocles' Orestes where an actor had pronounced galēn' horō "I see calm waters" with so much empathy that it came out galên horō "I see a weasel".

Origin of tone

Tone is frequently an areal rather than a genetic feature: that is, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language switch to the language in question. For example it is generally accepted that tone spread to the Chinese languages through the influence of another language family, most likely Miao-Yao. In other cases tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly: The dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not, although they were only separated in 1838.

An interesting question is how tones arise in a language, i.e. tonogenesis. In the Chinese languages they arose as a reinterpretation of initial and final consonants. Something very similar happened in Vietnamese, probably under the influence of Tai-Kadai languages; note that Khmer, which is genetically related to Vietnamese, is not a tonal language. In many languages, phonation distinctions of initial consonants are lost, with vowels after voiced consonants acquiring a low tone, and vowels after aspirated consonants acquiring a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone), whereas a final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation frequently develops into tone, as in the case of Burmese.

Three Algonquian languages developed tone independently of each other and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne, while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following [h] became low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.

Tone arose in the Athabascan languages at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo, syllables with glottalized consonants developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey, they developed high tones, so that the two tonal systems are almost mirror images of each other. Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa), did not develop tone. Thus the Athabascan word for water varies from toneless /-taʔ/ to /-tà/ and /-tá/.

Tone as a distinguishing feature

Most languages use intonation (that is, pitch) to convey grammatical structure or emphasis (see phonology), but this does not make them tonal languages in this sense. In these cases, tones can change how the audience is intended to interpret a word (e.g. sarcastically), but in tonal languages, the tone is an integral part of a word itself. Thus minimal pairs can exist in such a language, distinguished only by a change of tone.

To illustrate how tone can affect meaning, let us look at the following example from Mandarin, which has five tones, which can be indicated by diacritics over vowels:

1. A long, high level tone: ā
2. Starts at normal pitch and rises to the pitch of tone 1: á
3. A low tone, dipping down briefly before slowly rising to the starting level of tone 2: ǎ
4. A sharply falling tone, starting at the height of tone 1 and falling to somewhere below tone 2's onset: à
5. A neutral tone, sometimes indicated by a zero or a dot (·), which has no specific contour; the actual pitch expressed is directly influenced by the tones of the preceding and following syllables. Mandarin speakers refer to this tone as the "light tone" (輕聲).

These tones can lead to one syllable, e.g. "ma", having five meanings, depending on the tone associated with it, so that "mā" glosses as "mother", "má" as "hemp", "mǎ" as "horse", "mà" as "scold", and toneless "ma" at the end of a sentence acts as an interrogative particle. This differentiation in tone allows a speaker to create the (not entirely grammatical) sentence:

妈(mā) 妈(ma) 骂(mà) 马(mǎ) 的(de) 麻(má) 吗(ma)? (in traditional Chinese characters: "媽媽罵馬的麻嗎?")

"Is Mother scolding the horse's hemp?"

Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.

Register and contour tones

Tonal languages fall into two broad categories: register and contour systems. Mandarin and its close relatives have contour systems, where differences are made not based on absolute pitch, but on shifts in relative pitch in a word. Register systems are found in Bantu languages, which more typically seem to have 2 or 3 tones with specific relative pitches assigned to them, with a high tone and a low tone being the most common (plus a middle tone for languages that have a third pitch).

Please note that the word "pitch" is used loosely here, to refer to the comparative "difference" between a high pitch and a low pitch from one syllable to the next, rather than a contrast of absolute pitches such as one finds in music. As a result, when one combines tone with sentence contours, the musical pitch of a high tone at the beginning of a question may actually be lower than the musical pitch of a low-tone word at the end of the question, because the "average" pitch between the high and low tones rises (and falls) along with the overall pitch contour of the sentence.

Notational systems

Due to the fact that tonal languages are found all over the world, several systems to mark tone have developed independently. In Asian and Meso-american contexts, numerical systems are most common, whereas accent marks are used mainly in African contexts.

Africa

In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), usually a set of accent marks is used to mark tone. The most common phonetic set (which is also included in the International Phonetic Alphabet) is found below:

Several variations are found. In many three tone languages, it is common to mark High and Low tone as indicated above, but to omit marking of the Mid tone, e.g. má (High), ma (Mid), mà (Low). Similarly, in some two tone languages, only one tone is marked explicitly.

With more complex tonal systems, such as in the Kru and Omotic languages, it is usual to indicate tone with numbers, with 1 for HIGH and 4 or 5 for LOW. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.

Asia

In the most common Chinese tradition, numbers are assigned to various tones. For instance, Standard Mandarin has four tones, so the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 are generally assigned to each tone. There are 8 common tones in Chinese dialects, and outside of the official language, these numbers are used, though many dialects do not have all eight tones. Their numbers are based on traditional classification, due to their historical origin, and have nothing to do with the actual pitch values of the tones. Tone 5, for example, may have drastically different realizations in different dialects.

A more iconic system is to use tone numbers. The most common notation, known as the 'Chao tone letters', splits pitch into five levels: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The lowest pitch is 1, and the highest pitch 5. (This is contrary to similar systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch pf a tone contour is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows:

A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc.

The Thai language has an alphabetic writing system, which gives complete information on the tone. Tone is defined by an interaction between the "class" of the initial consonant of a syllable and a possible "tone mark" above it. The same tone mark may denote a different tone, depending on the class of the consonant. There are five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling.

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, so the 6 tones are marked by diacritical marks above or below the main vowel in each syllable. Before Unicode became popular, the VIQR convention was also used for online communication. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:

The Hmong language has an interesting notational system for tones. The seven tones of Hmong are indicated by an orthographic consonant "letter" occurring at the end of the word. This system enabled Hmong speakers to type their language using an ordinary Roman-letter typewriter without having to resort to using diacritics.

The Japanese language does not use tones, but does use a system of pitch accent, so 雨(ame) (rain) with falling pitch is distinguished from あめ(ame) (candy).

The Americas

In Meso-americanist linguistics, /1/ stands for High tone and /5/ stands for Low tone.

Europe

In Swedish and Norwegian, it is mostly used prosodically, but also to differentiate two-syllable words depending on their morphological structure. These accents are usually refered to as accent 1 and accent 2 or acute accent and grave accent respectively.

Tonal languages and music

Speakers of non-tonal languages (such as English) are often confused by implications that tonality has on music. This results largely from a misunderstanding about what tonality is. It is important to understand that tonal languages are relatively pitched, and not absolutely pitched. What this means is that a listener understands a particular syllable to carry a particular tone not based on the "note" the syllable is "sung" in, but rather based on how the tonal contour of the syllable varies with respect to the base intonation of the utterance as a whole.

Put another way, a tonal language (such as Mandarin) is not tonal in the sense that say, this word must be pronounced at such and such a frequency (for example, a B flat). It is from this misunderstanding that the confusion over music results. People assume (incorrectly) that a tonal language is incompatible with music because they cannot reconcile this misunderstanding with the nature of music (ie, "If 'love' must be pronounced as a B flat, how could one write a song that uses both the word 'love' and a corresponding note different from B flat?").

Instead, tone can be visualized this way. When people speak (or sing) the frequency of their voice has a baseline which varies from speaker to speaker. Many people will note, for example, that women and children on average speake in a higher voice than men do. This reflects the fact that while utterances in all languages exhibit important tonal variation, no language exhibits absolute intonation of the type described above (love pronounced with a B-flat). Instead, tone can be visualized as ripples in the overall intonation of the sentence. If the intonation of a sentence is rising, or is otherwise severely distorted to indicate emotion or melody, tonal information can still be communicated to the listener in the form of variations from this baseline.

While English is not a tonal language, it does incorporate tone. The canonical example is generally one that demonstrates the use of tone to confer the speaker's emotion or attitudes ("The blackboard's painted ORANGE?!" -- shock and surprise), but there is another, more subtle example that is worth considering, especially in the context of music: stress. English, like most Indo-European languages, is stress based. What is stress exactly? This varies substantially from language to language, but in the case of English, it could be thought of as variations in speech volume, vowel length, and most importantly, tonal contour, that serve to distinguish a particular syllable in a word as being the one that is "stressed". English is particularly interesting because it has phonemic stress: a change in a stress point can change the meaning of a word (record (noun) and record (verb) being a simple example). Careful attention to the pronunciation of such words and how they differ from each other will illustrate that a difference in intonational contour over the word is not a small part of what makes the words different. In this sense, English speakers have been incorporating tone as an aid in distinguishing certain pairs of words all their lives without knowing it.

This is important because no English speaker would ever suggest that "stress is dropped or ignored by English speaking singers to make their language compatible with music". It is, however, very common to hear this same assertion with regard to say, Mandarin pop music. As any speaker of Mandarin will tell you, the idea of Mandarin "with tones dropped" is as non-sensical as English "with stress dropped."

Just as English poets make use of meter to ensure that their poetry fits a particular rhythm, Chinese musicians choose lyrics that "fit" with the tune of the music. Sometimes (as is the case in Beijing opera), the intonation of individual syllables is exaggerated a great deal and music is composed to follow the intonation rather than the other way around, but this essentially never happens in popular music.

See also

• Meeussen's rule
• Tone name
• Tone contour
• Musical language
• Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

Bibliography

• Bao, Zhiming. (1999). The structure of tone. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511880-4.
• Fromkin, Victoria A. (Ed.). (1978). Tone: A linguistic survey. New York: Academic Press.
• Halle, Morris; & Stevens, Kenneth. (1971). A note on laryngeal features. Quarterly progress report 101. MIT.
• Hombert, Jean-Marie; Ohala, John J.; & Ewan, William G. (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language, 55, 37-58.
• Maddieson, Ian. (1978). Universals of tone. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of human language: Phonology (Vol. 2). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Odden, David. (1995). Tone: African languages. In J. Goldsmith (Ed.), Handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Pike, Kenneth L. (1948). Tone languages: A technique for determining the number and type of pitch contrasts in a language, with studies in tonemic substitution and fusion. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. (Reprinted 1972, ISBN 0-472-08734-7).
• Yip, Moira. (2002). Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-5217-7314-8 (hbk), ISBN 0-5217-7445-4 (pbk).br:Tonenn (yezhoniezh)

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