Tone (linguistics)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes. A slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal. However, most Indo-European languages, which include the majority of the most widely spoken languages in the world today, are not tonal. It is important to remember that lexical tone is a phenomenon that is non-native to the languages of most Western-educated linguists. Arguably, a toneme can be viewed as not as distinctive as a phoneme.

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning-that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes. A slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal. However, most Indo-European languages, which include the majority of the most widely spoken languages in the world today, are not tonal. It is important to remember that lexical tone is a phenomenon that is non-native to the languages of most Western-educated linguists. Arguably, a toneme can be viewed as not as distinctive as a phoneme.