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A feature of linguistic analysis common to many languages around the world is tonality. The
tone of a word is a high-low pitch pattern permanently associated with it. A change of tone alters the word as much as a change in its consonants or
vowels.
Chinese is perhaps the most well-known of such languages.
Tonality is different from intonation, which is present in every language. For example, a rising pitch at the end of a sentence often indicates a question, while a falling pitch indicates a statement. Intonation is a variable feature of phrases and sentences, while tonality is a fixed feature of individual words.
Geography of tonality
In Europe, only
Norwegian,
Swedish,
Scottish Gaelic,
Lithuanian,
Serbian,
Croatian, the
Limburgish language and some dialects of
Slovenian possess tonality, and only Lithuanian regularly marks it in text other than in dictionaries. The tones of Lithuanian are believed to be especially authentic, as they agree for the most part with the tones of Vedic Sanskrit, its ancient cousin. Another tonal language spoken in the
Indian subcontinent is
Punjabi.
Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa are tonal. Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the
Semitic languages, which are not.
In East Asia, most languages are tonal, but
Korean,
Khmer and
Japanese are not. In Tibetan, which is riven by dialects because of the harsh geography of
Tibet, the Central and Eastern dialects , are tonal, while the dialects of the West are not. Much speculation has been generated over the reasons for this partial tonogenesis.
Some of the native languages of North and South America possess tonality, especially the
Na-Dené languages of
Alaska and the
American Southwest , and the
Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages, which are mostly atonal, Yucatec, with the largest number of speakers, has developed five tones.
Patterns of tonality
Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In
English, one or more syllables are given an
accent, which can consist of a loud stress, a lengthened vowel, and a high pitch, or any combination of these. In tonal languages, the pitch accent must be present, but the others are optional. For example, in
Czech and
Hungarian, the first syllable of each word is stressed, but any syllable may be lengthened, and pitch is not used. In
French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final syllable has high pitch.
Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. There is much discussion about how much prominence pitch must have in order to label a language tonal.
Many sub-Saharan languages have a simple scheme, whereby individual syllables in a word are at a fixed pitch. High and low pitch are always permissible, and sometimes a middle level of pitch occurs as well. However, some are more complex. In
Yoruba there are three pitches middle, low, and high and the meaning of a word is determined by the pitch on the vowels. For example, the word
"owo" in Yoruba could mean "broom", "hand", or "respect" depending on how you pitch the vowels. Also, "you" in
Yoruba is
o in a middle pitch, while the word for "he, she, it" is
o in a high pitch. Change of pitch is used in some African languages for grammatical purposes, such as marking past tense.
Ancient Greek had a tonal pattern wherein, in isolated words, exactly one mora was high, and the others low. A short vowel was a single mora, and was therefore high or low, whereas a long vowel was two mora, and could therefore be low, rise from low to high or go down from high to low. Note that the scheme was more complex when words were grouped together, as they could form accentuation units with proclitic words at the start and enclitic words at the end, and such accentuation units could have multiple accents. By the start of middle-ages, this tonic accent system had been corrupted to a stress accent system, but remained recorded in written Greek until the 20th century.
In the
Japanese of
Tokyo, tonal patterns are adapted to multi-syllable words. Every word must contain a single continuous chain of high pitched syllables, beginning with either the first or second syllable. Syllables preceding and following this chain, if any, must be low.
E.g., the city name
Kyoto has tone
kyoOto, with the pitch pattern
low-high-low. The words for "chopstick", "bridge" and "edge" all have the consonant-vowel structure
hashi, but the first has the pitch pattern
high-low, the second
low-high, and the third also
low-high but followed by an obligatory
low in the next word.
Tonal contours are present in many languages, such as Yucatec, Thai,
Vietnamese and the many Chinese "dialects". In Standard Thai, every word has one of five associated contours: high even, middle even, low even, rising, or falling. Mandarin has four tones, similar to Thai's without the middle tone. Cantonese has at least 8 tonal contours: high even, high falling, high rising, middle even, middle rising, low even, low falling and low rising. Two of them are superimposed upon words with other tone contours to indicate emotional closeness or familiarity, in a manner parallel to the diminutive suffixes of many
Romance and
Slavic languages.
Theories of tonogenesis
Because languages can both acquire tonality and lose it , linguists have speculated on its origin. From comparison of the Tibetan dialects with and without tone, it appears that initial voiced consonants are associated with a low pitch register, while unvoiced ones associate with high. Also, the loss of final consonants in Central Tibetan , suggests that such loss gives rise to tonal contours. Both Chinese and Vietnamese are believed to have been atonal within the past two millennia, and to have developed their modern tonal systems in such a fashion.
Notational systems
Because the transcriptions of tonal languages in the Latin alphabet were often devised by untrained
Europeans, who were largely unfamiliar with the phenomenon, most official spellings of such languages today simply omit all indication of tonality. Even
Pinyin, the current official Romanization system for
Mandarin Chinese, is commonly printed in most publications without tone marks. This makes the Chinese words much harder to identify correctly; a parallel situation would arise if photographs of birds in birdwatching handbooks were printed in black and white instead of full color.
On the other hand, Vietnamese is written with
qu?c ng?, a Latin-based alphabet that denotes tones using diacritical marks above or below the base vowels; this was possibly inspired by a similar system used to write Ancient Greek. So too, Yoruba, almost alone among the tonal languages of Africa, is often written with tonal marks. The tonal marking of Navajo is especially simple, as only a single diacritic is needed to mark high, low, rising and falling tones.
However, all language spellings are inadequate in some way. Most languages of the Semitic family are written with most of the vowels left unexpressed; this tendency is found as far back as
Ancient Egyptian. Stress is not indicated in languages as distinct as English,
Russian and
Tagalog, even though stressing different syllables can indicate different words .
Pronouncing tonality
The difficulty of pronouncing and of recognizing tonal patterns in words is greatly exaggerated. Like any other unfamiliar linguistic feature, such as aspiration,
retroflexion or velarization, it can be taught and learned. Initially, tonal patterns can be sung like musical passages; then, the extreme range of pitch can be narrowed into that of ordinary speech. Since tonal languages often have long and short vowels, the analogy to teaching music, with both pitch and rhythm, is especially close.
See also
Prosody
Timing
Tone
Pitch accent
