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Languages that make use of tonemes are called tonal languages. The majority of languages in the world are tonal languages.
Perhaps the best-known examples of tonal languages are Mandarin and Cantonese, but in fact, many unrelated languages are tonal.
The Sino-Tibetan language group mainly consists of tonal languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tibetan. (Almost all Sino-Tibetan languages are tonal, e.g. the various Chinese languages, Tibetan, Burmese; however Newari, a language of Nepal, is non-tonal). Tonal languages have also emerged in many other language families, such as
Several dead languages also incorporate tones, including Vedic Sanskrit. Some linguists have suggested that Sumerian may have had tones (presumably to try and reduce the great number of homonyms of Sumerian whose lexemes and morphemes are all monosyllabic), but that hypothesis has not been generally accepted.
(Actually Vedic Sanskrit is more often called a pitch accent language, but since a small number of words in the late pronunciation of Vedic carry the so called independent svarita on a short vowel one can argue that late Vedic was marginally a tone language. Note however that in the metrically restaured versions of the Rgveda almost all of the syllables carrying an independant svarita must revert to a sequence of two syllables the first of which carries an anusvaara and the second a (so called) dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tone language but a pitch accent language.)
Generally tone in a language is an areal, not a genetic, feature: that is, a language tends to (but does not always automatically) acquire tones if many neighboring languages also are tonal. For example it is accepted that tones in the East-Asian language area spread from the Chinese family (Sinitic) or from Tai-Kadai (more probably from Sinitic). An interesting question is how tones arise in a language. For example in Chinese they arose as a reinterpretation of initial or final consonant clusters as a pitch inflection of the vocalic nucleus of syllables. (It is known, in all languages, that surrounding consonants influence the pitch of the adjacent vowel). The same thing happened for Vietnamese (under the influence of Chinese probably; note that Khmer which is genetically related to Vietnamese does not have tones). This mechanism seems to account for appearance of contour tones. (How do register tones arise?).
Most languages use tone (that is, pitch) to convey grammatical structure or emphasis (see phonologyPhonology is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). Whereas phonetics is about the nature of sounds (or phones) per se, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language. For example, /p/ and /b/ in English are distinctive units o), 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 pairIn phonetics, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phoneme and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language. English "let"s 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:
These tones can lead to one syllable, e.g. "ma", having five meanings, depending on the tone associated with it, so that "ma1 ma5" glosses as "mother", "ma2" as "hemp", "ma3" as "horse", "ma4" as "scold", and "ma5" 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 "ma1 ma5 ma4 ma3 de5 ma2 ma5?", or "Is Mother scolding the horse's hemp?" (Māma mà mǎ de má ma? 妈妈骂马的麻吗？), where the series of "ma"s are differentiated in meaning only by their tone.
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhiTone sandhi refers to tone manipulation rules governing the pronunciation of tonal languages. Sandhi in Sanskrit means "putting together". Languages with such rules include: Most varieties of spoken Chinese Cherokee Ewe In Mandarin Chinese, the most commo.
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.