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Tone Language

Tone (or lexical tone) is the incorporation of pitch into the phonological inventory of a language. Every tone language is different, but typological generalizations across languages distinguish tone from other uses of pitch in language. Pitch is also a fundamental component of most forms of music, and there are important similarities and differences between linguistic and musical pitch. Linguistic influence on musical behaviors (and vice versa) provides insight into the cognitive relationship between music and language.

Tone Language Typology

Up to 70 percent of the world's languages can be classified as tone languages, with most occurring in Africa, east and southeast Asia, and the Americas. Pitch is linguistically used in several ways; lexical tone refers specifically to the use of syllable pitch to distinguish individual words. This is distinct from intonation, which distinguishes sentence types (e.g., statement versus question), indicates focus, or conveys extralinguistic information. Pitch accent sometimes refers to languages (e.g., Japanese or Norwegian) that use word-level pitch, but in a more limited way. Thus, one way of classifying languages is as a continuum, from nontone languages (e.g., French) at the less-tonal end to lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) at the more tonal end.

Languages are also classified by the type and number of tones that they contain. Register tone languages contain only level tones (they may contain noncontrastive rising or falling tones by phonological rule); an example is Yoruba (Niger-Congo, Nigeria), with low, mid, and high tones. Contour tone languages contain tones in which the pitch changes over the course of the syllable (e.g., rising, falling, or more complex shapes); an example is Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan, China), with high-level, falling, rising, and dipping tones.

Register tone languages may contain from 2 to 5 tones. Contour tone languages may contain as many as 13 tones, but the complexities of tonal phonology make determining the exact number of tone categories in a language difficult. Generally, tone languages with more tones are rarer than those with fewer, and phonetically complex tones (e.g., concave or convex) are rarer than simple tones (e.g., rising, falling, or level).

Phonetics and Perception

Tones are not defined by fixed frequencies, but by their shape and position within the pitch range of the speaker. In most register tone languages, tones are separated by 2 to 3 semitones (rather than maximal dispersion within the range), with the total pitch range increasing for languages with more tones. Contour tones are rare in languages with three or fewer tones, which suggests that contour tones result when an upper bound on level tones within vocal pitch range is reached.

Tone perception depends on many acoustic factors, including fundamental frequency, harmonics, voice quality, and duration. This redundancy aids accurate perception in noise or of a degraded signal, such as whispered speech. Pitch is the primary phonetic component of tone, but the pitch of a syllable can be perceived along several dimensions, which can be classified as static (e.g., average or endpoint pitch) or dynamic (e.g., direction, slope, or shape of pitch change). Speakers attend to these dimensions based on their relative importance to their language's tonal inventory, or to particular tonal contrasts. This sensitivity affects the perception of unfamiliar tones when learning a second language. Speakers of nontone languages tend to rely only on static pitch dimensions of syllables when encountering lexical tones.

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