Tonal Languages - Tonal Languages

Tonal Languages

Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family which is predominately tonal, notably excepting Swahili (in the Southeast), and Wolof, Koyra Chiini and Fulani (in the West/Horn region). The Afroasiatic languages of Northeastern sub-Saharan Africa include both tonal (Chadic, Omotic, and to some extent Cushitic) and nontonal (Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian) branches.

There are numerous tonal languages in East Asia and South East Asia. Most Sino-Tibetan languages including all the Chinese languages (though some such as Shanghainese are only marginally tonal), Lhasa Tibetan and Burmese are tonal, as are Austroasiatic languages such as, Vietnamese, Tai-Kadai languages including Thai, and Lao, and Austronesian languages Cemuhi. However, some members of these families are also nontonal including Amdo Tibetan, Khmer and Malay. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur and Japanese belong to language families that do not contain any tonality as defined here.

A few languages outside these major groups have tonality, including Lahnda, Punjabi and Ancient Greek, which are Indo-European languages. Although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia.

A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest (including Navajo), and 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 tone systems. However, although tone systems have been recorded for many American languages, little theoretical work has been completed for the characterization of their tone systems. In different cases, Central American tone languages have been found to possess tone systems similar to both Asian and African tone languages.

Languages that are tonal include:

• Some of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Most forms of Chinese, (an exception being Shanghainese); some Tibetan languages, including the standard languages of Lhasa and Bhutan and Burmese.
• In the Austro-Asiatic family, Vietnamese and other members of the Vietic family are strongly tonal. Other branches of this family, such as Mon, Khmer, and the Munda languages, are entirely non-tonal.
• The entire Tai-Kadai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and including Thai and Lao is tonal.
• The entire Hmong–Mien family is tonal.
• Many Afroasiatic languages in the Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic families have register tone systems, including Hausa. Omotic languages are an exception in this family in having both contour and register tones; most have only two to three register tones, like Somali.
• 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.
• Most Nilo-Saharan languages including Dinka and Luo have register tone systems.
• All Khoisan languages in southern Africa have contour tone systems; some languages like Sandawe have mixed tone systems like that of Cantonese.
• Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo, have register tone systems (languages in California, Oregon and a few in Alaska excluded). The Athabaskan tone languages fall into two "mirror image" groups. 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.
• Iroquoian languages like Mohawk have register tone.
• All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal. Most have register tone, though some have contour tones as well. In some cases, as with Mixtec, tone system variations between dialects are sufficiently great to cause mutual unintelligibility.
• Many Papuan languages of New Guinea like Siane possess register tone systems.
• Some Indo-European languages as well as others possess what is termed pitch accent, where changes in pitch (as opposed to amplitude) mark the stressed syllable in an utterance; these are not always considered to be cases of tone language.
• Some European-based creole languages, such as Saramaccan and Papiamentu, have tone from their African substratum languages.

In some cases it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. 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.

The 19th-century constructed language Solresol, attempts to convey information using only tone.