Tone (linguistics) - Tonal Languages

Tonal Languages

Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa are tonal, notably excepting Swahili in the East, and Wolof, Koyra Chiini 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 and South East Asia, including all the Chinese languages (though some such as Shanghainese are only marginally tonal), Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao. Some East Asian languages, such as Burmese, Korean, and Japanese have simpler tone systems, which are sometimes called 'register' or 'pitch accent' systems. However, some languages in the region are not tonal at all, including Mongolian, Khmer, and 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.

Along with Lahnda and Western Pahari languages, Punjabi is unusual among modern Indo-European languages for being a tonal language.

Some of the native languages of North and South America are tonal, notably many of the Athabaskan 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 simple tone systems.

In Europe, Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbo-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.

Languages that are tonal include:

• Some of the Sino-Tibetan languages, including the numerically significant 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 Tai-Kadai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, is strongly tonal.
• The entire Hmong–Mien family is strongly tonal.
• Many Afroasiatic 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.
• Iroquoian languages are tonal, for example the Mohawk language has three tones.
• All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal. Most have register-tone systems, some contour systems. These are perhaps the most complex tone systems in North America.
• The 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 Ancient Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Limburgish, Lithuanian, the West South Slavic languages (Slovene and Serbo-Croatian), Vedic Sanskrit, and Punjabi 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, for example Ma'ya (which also has lexical stress) have developed tone, and also the Tsat language has developed tone probably as a result of areal linguistic effects and contact with Chinese, Hlai/Li, and the other tonal languages of Hainan. No tonal language has been reported from Australia. 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 most thoroughly tonal language is the 19th-century constructed language Solresol, which consists of only tone.