Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and … 展开

Tone terracing
Tones are realized as pitch only in a relative sense. "High tone" and "low tone" are only meaningful … 展开

There are several approaches to notating tones in the description of a language. A fundamental difference is between phonemic and phonetic transcription.
A phonemic notation will typically lack any consideration of the actual phonetic values of the tones. Such … 展开

Africa
Most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal; notable exceptions are Swahili (in the southeast), most languages spoken in the Senegambia (among … 展开

Register tones and contour tones
In many Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a single tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, … 展开

In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms. This is characteristic of heavily … 展开

André-Georges Haudricourt established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese. It is now widely held that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. The historical origin of tone is … 展开