Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of <a href="/facts/Pitch_(music)/fQAK0JsC">pitch</a> in <a href="/facts/Language/IRcTok2q">language</a> to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to <a href="/facts/Inflection/mhXSXpmJ">inflect</a> words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called <a href="/facts/Intonation_(linguistics)/yzNJ9gdA">intonation</a>, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive <a href="/facts/Tone_pattern/tj36JP0b">tone patterns</a> of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with <a href="/facts/Phoneme/EXGHlJ7a">phoneme</a>. Tonal languages are common in <a href="/facts/East_Asia/D8yGVCQX">East</a> and <a href="/facts/Southeast_Asia/VafwT517">Southeast Asia</a>, <a href="/facts/Africa/XkqQUP9s">Africa</a>, <a href="/facts/The_Americas/hEuUTL4K">the Americas</a>, and the <a href="/facts/Pacific_islands/AxJ5sXWp">Pacific</a>.
Tonal languages are different from <a href="/facts/Pitch-accent_language/aIQu5zse">pitch-accent languages</a> in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or <a href="/facts/Morpheme/4JNcPMHs">morpheme</a> that is more prominent than the others.

Tone (linguistics) open-in-new

Tone (linguistics)