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Concept
Tone (linguistics)
Summary
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic 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. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.
Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others.
Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects.
Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
! rowspan="2" | Tone name
! rowspan="2" | Tone ID
! rowspan="2" | Vni/telex/Viqr
! rowspan="2" | Description
! colspan="2" | Chao Tone Contour
! rowspan="2" | Diacritic
! rowspan="2" | Example
|-
! Northern
! Southern
|-
| ngang "flat"
| A1
| [default]
| mid level
| colspan="2" | ˧ (33) or ˦ (44)
| style="text-align: center;" | ◌
| ma
|-
| huyền "deep"
| A2
| 2 / f / `
| low falling (breathy)
| colspan="2" | ˧˩ (31) or ˨˩ (21)
| style="text-align: center;" | ◌̀
| mà
|-
| sắc "sharp"
| B1
| 1 / s / '
| mid rising, tense
| colspan="2" | ˧˥ (35) or ˦˥ (45)
| style="text-align: center;" | ◌́
| má
|-
| nặng "heavy"
| B2
| 5 / j / .
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood