Tonal language

2

Summary

Subject:

Tonal language

Content

1. Introduction

2. Tonal languages

3. Tone as a distinguishing feature

4. Register tones and contour tones

4.1 Register languages

5. Tone terracing and tone sandhi

6. Word tones and syllable tones

7. Tonal polarity

8. Uses of tone

9. Phonetic notation

9.1 Africa

9.2 Asia

9.3 The Americas

9.4 Europe

10. Practical orthographies

11. Number of tones

12. Tonal consonants

13. Origin of tone

14. Tone in English

References

1 Introduction

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning--that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All 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.

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. It is important to remember that lexical tone is a phenomenon that is non-native to the languages of most Western-educated linguists. Arguably, a toneme can be viewed as not as distinctive as a phoneme.

In the most widely-spoken tonal language, Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour), most syllables carry their own tone, and many words are differentiated solely by tone. Furthermore, tone tends to play almost no grammatical role (the Jin language of Shanxi being a notable exception). In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, however, tones are distinguished by their relative level, words are longer, there are fewer minimal tone pairs, and 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.

Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese, less than half of the words have 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.

2. Tonal languages

Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa are tonal, though notably excepting Swahili in the East, and Wolof and Fulani in the West. The Chadic, Omotic, and to some extent Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic are tonal--the Omotic languages heavily so--though their sister families of Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian are not.

There are numerous tonal languages in East Asia, including all the Chinese languages (though some such as Shanghainese are only marginally tonal), Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, and to a lesser extent Burmese, Korean, and Japanese (these simple systems are sometimes called 'register' (Burmese) or 'pitch accent' (Korean, Japanese)), but not Mongolian, Khmer, or Malay. Of the Tibetan languages, Central Tibetan (including the dialect of the capital Lhasa) and Amdo Tibetan are tonal, while Khams Tibetan and Ladakhi are not.

Some of the native languages of North and South America are tonal, notably many of the Na-Dene languages of Alaska and the American Southwest (including Navajo), and especially the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec (with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tones.

In Europe, Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, some dialects of Slovene, and Limburgish have simple tone systems generally characterized as pitch accent. Other Indo-European tonal languages, spoken in the Indian subcontinent, are Punjabi, Lahanda, Rabinian and Western Pahari.[1][2][3][4]

Languages that are tonal include:

Some of the Sino-Tibetan languages, including the numerically most important ones. Most forms of Chinese are strongly tonal (an exception being Shanghainese, where the system has collapsed to only a two-way contrast at the word level with some initial consonants, and no contrast at all with others); 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 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.

The entire Kradai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, is strongly tonal.

The entire Hmong-Mien languages family is strongly tonal.

Many Afro-Asiatic languages in the Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic families have register-tone systems, such as Chadic Hausa. Many of the Omotic tone systems are quite complex. However, many other languages in these families, such as the Cushitic language Somali, have minimal tone.

The vast majority of Niger-Congo languages, such as Ewe, Igbo, Lingala, Maninka, Yoruba, and the Zulu, have register-tone systems. The Kru languages have contour tones. Notable non-tonal Niger-Congo languages are Swahili, Fula, and Wolof.

Possibly all Nilo-Saharan languages have register-tone systems.

All Khoisan languages in southern Africa have contour-tone systems.

Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo, have simple register-tone systems (languages in California, Oregon and a few in Alaska excluded), but the languages that have tone fall into two groups that are mirror images of each other. 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.

All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal. Most have register-tone systems, some contour systems. These are perhaps the most complex tone systems in America.

The Kiowa-Tanoan languages.

Scattered languages of the Amazon basin, usually with rather simple register-tone systems.

Scattered languages of New Guinea, usually with rather simple register-tone systems.

A few Indo-European languages, namely Panjabi, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Swedish, Norwegian, Limburgish, Lithuanian, and West South Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian and Serbian) have limited word-tone systems which are sometimes called pitch accent or "tonal accents". Generally there can only be at most one tonic syllable per word of 2-5 different registers, as well as additional distinctive and non-distinctive pre- and post-tonic lengths.

Some European-based creole languages, such as Saramaccan and Papiamentu, have tone from their African substratum languages.

The vast majority of Austronesian languages are non-tonal, but a small number have developed tone. 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, 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 (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.

A famous example of tone in Ancient Greek comes from Aristophanes' Frogs, where (l. 304) Aristophanes mentions an instance at a performance of Euripides' play Orestes, where an actor pronounced gal?n' horф "I see calm waters" with so much empathy that it came out galen horф "I see a frog"

3. Tone as a distinguishing feature

Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, tone is phonemic, and thus minimal pairs distinguished by tone exist in such languages.

Here is a minimal tone set from Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, here transcribed by diacritics over the vowels:

A high level tone: /a/ (pinyin <в>)

A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /a/ (pinyin <a>)

A low tone which dips briefly before, if there is no following syllable, rising a high pitch: /a/ (pinyin <a>)

A sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /a/ (pinyin <a>)

A neutral tone, sometimes indicated by a dot (·) in Pinyin, has no specific contour; its pitch depends on the tones of the preceding and following syllables. Mandarin speakers refer to this tone as the "light tone" (??).

These tones combine with a syllable such as "ma" to produce different words. A minimal set based on "ma" are, in pinyin transcription,

mв "mother"

ma "hemp"

ma "horse"

ma "scold"

ma (an interrogative particle)

These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence,

????“I–ѓ?? (in traditional characters ›_›_”l”n“I–ѓ??)

Pinyin: mвma ma ma de ma ma?

English:"Is Mother scolding the horse's hemp?"

A well-known tongue-twister in the Thai language is:

дЛБгЛБидЛБйБСйВ

IPA: /mai mai mai mai/

"Does new silk burn?"[5]

Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi. A simple example is seen in the way that the Mandarin bu with a falling tone changes to bu before another falling tone, thus the phrase •sђҐ is not pronounced bu shi, rather it is pronounced bu shi.

4. Register tones and contour tones

Tone systems fall into two broad patterns: Register tone systems and contour tone systems.

Most Chinese languages use contour tone systems, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages, on the other hand, have register tone systems, where the distinguishing feature is the relative difference between the pitches, such as high, mid, or low, rather than their shapes. In many register tone 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 register and contour tones, such as many Kru languages, where nouns are distinguished by contour tones and verbs by register. Others, such as Yoruba, have phonetic contours, but these can easily be analysed as sequences of register tones, with for example sequences of high-low /aa/ becoming falling [a?], and sequences of low-high /aa/ becoming rising [a?].

4.1 Register languages

The term "register", when not used in the phrase "register tone", commonly indicates vowel phonation combined with tone in a single phonological system. Burmese, for example, is a register language, where differences in pitch are so intertwined with vowel phonation that neither can be considered without the other.

5. Tone terracing and tone sandhi

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 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.

Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep 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 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 tones.

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, 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 њk[x?n???] 'very' and ЌD[xa????] 'good' produce the phrase њkЌD[x?n?? xa????] 'very good'.

6. 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, Thai, and to some extent the Kru languages, each syllable may have any tone, whereas in Shanghainese, the Scandinavian languages, and many Bantu languages, 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 tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent 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 suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence.

After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid register tone - the 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.

7. Tonal polarity

Languages with simple tone systems or pitch accent 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, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, while marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani, however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone.[6] There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables, whereas in Russian, stressed syllables have a lower pitch.

8. Uses of tone

In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms, rather than in the grammar, though some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone. However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger-Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems reminiscent of East Asia, but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood, person, and polarity, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between 'you went' and 'I won't go'. In colloquial Yoruba, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may assimilate to each other, and consonants elide, so 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 drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech.

9. Phonetic notation

There are three main approaches to notating tones in phonetic descriptions of a language.

The easiest from a typological perspective is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned numerals, and each tone transcribed as a numeral or sequence of numerals. Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic, for example with high tone being assigned the numeral 1, 3, or 5, and so have not been adopted for the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Also simple for simple tone systems is a series of diacritics, such as <o> for high tone and <o> for low tone. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one work-around). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are <o o ф o ?>. These may be combined to form contour tones, <o o o? o? o? o? o? o?>, though font support is sparse. Sometimes a non-IPA vertical diacritic for a second, higher, mid tone is seen, <o?>, so that in a language with four level tones, they may be transcribed o o? ф o.

The most flexible system is that of tone letters, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, as in Liberia and Southern China.

9.1 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:

High tone acute a

Mid tone macron в

Low tone grave a

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., ma (High), ma (Mid), ma (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 in Kru, but 1 for LOW and 5 for HIGH in Omotic. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.

9.2 Asia

In the Chinese tradition, numerals are assigned to various tones. For instance, Standard Mandarin has four lexically contrastive tones, and the numerals 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 dialects are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories ping 'level', shang 'rising', qu 'exiting', ru 'entering'. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called yin and yang. Syllables carrying the ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in all Chinese dialects, so that 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 syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. During the period of Middle Chinese, 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 alternate to using the Chinese category names is to assign to each category a numeral ranging from 1-8, or sometimes higher for dialects with additional tone splits. It should be noted that syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the Chinese dialects. For example, the yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin, but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin.

More iconic systems are to use tone numbers, or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as 'Chao tone letters'. 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 is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows (note that the tone letters will not display properly unless you have a compatible font installed):

Tones of Standard Mandarin High tone 55 ?? (Tone 1)

Mid rising tone 35 ?? (Tone 2)

Low dipping tone 214 ??? (Tone 3)

High falling tone 51 ?? (Tone 4)

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

Standard IPA 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 languages have more than one rising or falling tone. One common work-around is to retain standard IPA /??/ and /??/ for high-rising (/35/) and high-falling (/53/) tones, and to use the subscript diacritics /??/ and /??/ for low-rising (/13/) and low-falling (/31/) tones.

The Thai language has five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling. The Thai written script is an alphasyllabary which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant.

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, and the 6 tones are marked by diacritics above or below a certain vowel of each syllable. In many words that end in diphthongs, however, exactly which vowel is marked is still debatable. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:

Tones of northern Vietnamese Name Contour Diacritic Example

ngang mid level, ? not marked a

huy?n low falling, ?? grave accent a

s?c high rising, ?? acute accent a

h?i dipping, ??? hook ?

nga creaky rising, ??? tilde a

n?ng creaky falling, ??? dot below ?

The Latin-based Hmong and Iu Mien 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. This system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter typewriter without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but, unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.

The Japanese language does not have tone, but does have downstep, so that ‰J ame (rain), with a drop in pitch after the first syllable, is distinguished from ‚ ‚Я ame (candy), which has no drop.

9.3 The Americas

Several North American languages have tone, one of which is Oklahoma Cherokee, said to be the most musical of the Iroquoian languages[citation needed]. Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 23 rising and 32 falling).

In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for High tone and /5/ stands for Low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages, where /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 ‹j› or ‹h› after a vowel to indicate low tone.

Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having 2 tones, high and low. One variety of Hopi has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language.

The Mesoamerican language stock called Oto-Manguean is notoriously tonal and is the largest language family in Mesoamerica, containing languages including Zapotec, Mixtec, and Otomi, some of which have as many as 8 different tones (Chinantec,) and others only two (Matlatzinca and Chichimeca Jonaz). Other languages in Mesoamerica that have tones are Huichol, Yukatek Maya, Tzotzil Maya of San Bartolo and Uspantec Maya (Quiche of Uspantan), and one variety of Huave.

A number of languages of South America are tonal. For example, the Piraha language has three tones. The Ticuna language isolate is exceptional for having five level tones (the only other languages to have such a system are the Trique language and the Usila dialect of Chinantec (both Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico).

9.4 Europe

Both Swedish and Norwegian have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent, that only appears in words of two or more syllables. This differentiates some two-syllable words depending on their morphological structure. The two word tones are usually called accent 1 and accent 2 (or acute accent and grave accent), respectively. Limburgish is similar. For further explanation and examples, see the Swedish, Norwegian, and Limburgish language articles.

10. Practical orthographies

In practical alphabetic orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in pinyin, though these tend to be omitted.[7] Thai uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Or tone may simply be ignored. This is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades, and likewise Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan, a variety of Mandarin spoken in Central Asia, has had a written literature since 1927 in orthographies that do not indicate tone since.[7] Ndjuka, where 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.

11. Number of tones

Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language 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 5 registers. However, the most that are actually used in a language is a tenth of that number.

Several Kam-Sui languages of southern China have nine tones, including contour tones, assuming that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. Preliminary work on the Wobe language of Liberia and Ivory Coast and the Chatino languages of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones, but many linguists have expressed doubts, believing that many of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects.

12. Tonal consonants

Tone is carried by the word or syllable, so syllabic consonants such as nasals and trills may bear tone. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian.

13. Origin of tone

Andre-Georges Haudricourt established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts, and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese.[8] It is by now well-established that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. The historical origin of tone is called tonogenesis, a term coined by James Matisoff. Tone is frequently an areal rather than a genealogical feature: That is, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question, and bring their tones with them. 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.

Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. (Such trace effects of disappeared tones or other sounds have been nicknamed Cheshirisation, after the lingering smile of the disappearing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.) In a non-tonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants do. This 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 had carried, and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic). We can see this historically in Panjabi: the Panjabi murmured (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; if at the end, a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch so as not to interfere with the low and high tones, and so has become a tone of its own: mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Panjabi 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 fricatives or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken to /h/ and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with the Chinese languages: Two of the three tones of Middle Chinese, the "rising" and "leaving" tones, arose as the Old Chinese final consonants /?/ and /s/ > /h/ disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most dialects descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split, where each tone split in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced: Vowels following an unvoiced consonant acquired a higher tone while those following a voiced consonant acquired a lower tone as the voiced consonants lost their 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, Vietnamese, and the Lhasa dialect of Tibetan.

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), whereas 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.

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 (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda 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. Syllables without glottalized codas developed the opposite tone--for example, high tone in Navajo and low tone in Slavey, due to contrast with the tone triggered by the glottalization. Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word for "water" *tu? is toneless to? in Hupa, high-tone to in Navajo, and low-tone tu in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan *-??t? "knee" is toneless -?ot? in Hupa, low-tone -?od in Navajo, and high-tone -?o? in Slavey. Kingston (2005) provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either (a) tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high F0, or (b) creaky voice, 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 also have "mirror" tone systems, where the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.

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] acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.

14. Tone in English

Most native varieties of English (such as RP, General American, Australian, etc) are not tonal languages, though intonation may become semi-lexicalized in common expressions such as "I'unno" (I don't know). Pitch also plays a role in distinguishing acronyms that might otherwise be mistaken for common words. For example, in the phrase "Nike asks that you play--Participate in the Lives of America's Youth",[9] the acronym play may be pronounced with a high tone to distinguish it from the verb 'play', which would also make sense in this context. However, the high tone is only employed for disambiguation, and is therefore contrastive intonation rather than true tone.

Due in part to colonization from the early 19th century, English has spread far and wide to other parts of the world. In places like India, Singapore and Hong Kong, English has become nativized producing non-native varieties of English like Singapore English, Hong Kong English and Indian English, among many other Englishes. Some of these varieties of English, Singapore English and Hong Kong English for example, are possibly tonal. In both these cases, tone is used as a form of pitch accent similar to the tonal systems of Japanese, Norwegian and Swedish. In Singapore English, all polysyllabic words end with a high toned syllable. All remaining syllables will carry mid-tones, except for the initial syllable that carry the low tone in some cases. For example, "information" would be MMMH, where M is a mid tone, and H is a high tone. "professor" would be LMH. Some English-based creoles, such as Ndyuka, are completely tonal.

References

1. Bao, Zhiming. (1999). The structure of tone. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511880-4.

2. Chen, Matthew Y. 2000. Tone Sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge, England: CUP ISBN 0-521-65272-3

3. Clements, George N.; Goldsmith, John (eds.) (1984) Autosegmental Studies in Bantu Tone. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer.

4. Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.). (1978). Tone: A linguistic survey. New York: Academic Press.

5. Halle, Morris; & Stevens, Kenneth. (1971). A note on laryngeal features. Quarterly progress report 101. MIT.

6. Haudricourt, Andre-Georges. (1954). De l'origine des tons en vietnamien. Journal Asiatique, 242: 69-82.

7. Haudricourt, Andre-Georges. (1961). Bipartition et tripartition des systemes de tons dans quelques langues d'Extreme-Orient. Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris, 56: 163-180.

8. Hombert, Jean-Marie; Ohala, John J.; & Ewan, William G. (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language, 55, 37-58.

9. Hyman, Larry. 2007. There is no pitch-accent prototype. Paper presented at the 2007 LSA Meeting. Anaheim, CA.

10. Hyman, Larry. 2007. How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent. Berkeley, UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report: 654-685. Available online.

11. Kingston, John. (2005). The phonetics of Athabaskan tonogenesis. In S. Hargus & K. Rice (Eds.), Athabaskan prosody (pp. 137-184). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

12. Maddieson, Ian. (1978). Universals of tone. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of human language: Phonology (Vol. 2). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

13. Michaud, Alexis. (2008). Tones and intonation: some current challenges. Proc. of 8th Int. Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP'08), Strasbourg, pp. 13-18. (Keynote lecture.) Available online.

14. Odden, David. (1995). Tone: African languages. In J. Goldsmith (Ed.), Handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

15. 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).

16. Wee, Lian-Hee (2008) Phonological Patterns in the Englishes of Singapore and Hong Kong. World Englishes 27(3/4):480-501.

17. Yip, Moira. (2002). Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-77314-8 (hbk), ISBN 0-521-77445-4 (pbk).