Tonal Languages - Uses of Tone

Uses of Tone

In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms, rather than in the grammar, though some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone. (In Old Chinese, tones may have grammatical functions.) However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems reminiscent of East Asia, but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood, person, and polarity, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between 'you went' and 'I won't go'. In colloquial Yoruba, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may assimilate to each other, and consonants elide, so that much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "talking drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech.

Tone as a linguistic feature may be less binary than it is typically conceived to be; the first image at right shows the distribution of all languages possessing more than two tones ('complex' tone), regardless of whether they are register or contour (or mixed) systems.

Note that tonal languages are not distributed evenly across the same range as non-tonal languages. Instead, the majority of tone languages belong to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic groups, which are then composed by a large majority of tone languages and dominate a single region. Only in limited locations--South Africa, New Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others do tone languages seem to occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, this may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when examining distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality, but simply have relatively few members, while for some North American tone languages multiple independent origins are suspected.

If generally considering only complex-tone vs. no-tone it might be concluded that tone is almost always an ancient feature within a language family that is highly conserved among members. However, when considered in addition to 'simple' tone systems that include only two tones, tone as a whole appears to be more labile, appearing several times within Indo-European, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families. This may indicate that rather than a trait unique to some language families, tone is a latent feature of most language families that may more easily arise and disappear as languages change over time.