Tone Sandhi - Languages With Tone Sandhi

Languages With Tone Sandhi

Not all tone languages have tone sandhi. Sandhi rules are found in many of the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico. Cherokee has a robust tonal system in which tones may combine in various ways, following subtle and complex tonal rules that vary from community to community.

Many Chinese languages have tone sandhi, some of it quite complex. While Mandarin sandhi is simple, Amoy Min has a more complex system, with every one of its tones changing into a different tone when it occurs before another, and which tone it turns into depends on the final consonant of the syllable that bears it.

Amoy has five tones, which are reduced to two in checked syllables (which end in a stop consonant—these are numbered 4 and 8 in the diagram above). Within a phonological word, all syllables but the last change tone. Among unchecked syllables (that is, those that do not end in a stop), tone 1 becomes 7, 7 becomes 3, 3 becomes 2, and 2 becomes 1. Tone 5 becomes 7 or 3, depending on dialect. Stopped syllables ending in /p/, /t/, or /k/ take the opposite tone (phonetically, a high tone becomes low, and a low tone becomes high), whereas syllables ending in a glottal stop (written h in the diagram above) drop their final consonant to become tone 2 or 3.

The seven or eight tones of Hmong demonstrate several instances of tone sandhi. In fact the contested distinction between the seventh and eighth tones surrounds the very issue of tone sandhi (between glottal stop (-m) and low rising (-d) tones). High and high-falling tones (marked by -b and -j in the RPA orthography, respectively) trigger sandhi in subsequent words bearing particular tones. A frequent example can be found in the combination for numbering objects (ordinal number + classifier + noun): ib (one) + tus (classifier) + dev (dog) => ib tug dev (note tone change on the classifier from -s to -g).