Tag: tone

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes. Tonal languages are extremely common in Africa and East Asia, but rare elsewhere in Asia and in Europe.
In the most widely-spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour) and pitch range (or register). Many words are differentiated solely by tone, and each syllable in a multisyllabic word often carries its own tone. Moreover, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that did have morphological significance (e.g. changing a…