What is a Tonal Language?

By Paul

If you have tried to learn about any variety of Chinese, or many other languages especially in Asia but also in other parts of the world, you have probably encountered the idea of “tone.” Mandarin is a “tonal language,” and so on and so forth. But what exactly does that mean?

At first it seems fairly obvious, if you have been exposed to the idea at all - the tone of voice that you say words with makes a difference in the meaning. For example, in Mandarin, if you say the syllable “ma” with a high, level tone, it means “mother,” but if you say it with a low, slightly dipping tone, it means “horse.” 

In order to understand this better, and why it seems so different from English and similar languages, we need to step back and talk about pitch in general. Whenever you speak - not for all sounds, but always for vowels - your vocal chords are vibrating at a given frequency. Everyone’s voice has a slightly different way of vibrating and slightly different default frequency, but we are all capable of modulating that frequency and making our voice have a lower or higher pitch. Since pitch is an essential part of the human voice, it plays an important role in human language - but what role exactly that it plays depends on the language.

So, let’s ask a new question - why is English not a tonal language? Obviously, our tone - that is, our pitch - is always present and it plays a role in how we communicate. But the important part is, tone does not have what we call “lexical” meaning or any grammatical role. The pitch of your voice when speaking English is used to convey your attitude and emotions, and also whether you are asking a question or not - in fact, tonal languages such as Chinese do this too. However, unlike Chinese, Vietnamese and many other languages, in English you can say the same sequence of consonants and vowels with multiple tone contours and the meaning of the word stays the same. 

There is a slight caveat to this, however. English and many other languages do have stress, and stress can be associated with a higher pitch (or lower, depending on the language), alongside increased loudness. So even in languages that are not tone languages, you have an “accent” which occurs on only one syllable in the word, and one of the core parts of an accent is pitch. In fact, this rule that an accent can only occur on one syllable in a word is one of the essential parts of a non-tonal, stress-based language. 

In tonal languages, however, all syllables in a word have a tone. Don’t assume that this is always like Mandarin where there are 4 or 5 different tones; indeed, most of the tonal languages of the world - throughout much of Africa, for example - have only two or three tones: High, Low, and sometimes a mid tone. Having many contour-based tones is something you mainly only see in eastern Asia. 

One final question you might have asked is, where do tones come from? In probably the majority of cases we actually do not know and in some parts of the world such as subsaharan Africa, all we know is that languages have had tones for as long as is possible to know. However, there are some ways for languages to develop tones from being a non-tonal language. Indeed, Old Chinese was probably a non-tonal language. The change that created tone there is a process where consonants disappeared and caused the pitch of the vowel they were next to to change to a certain tone. Sometimes stress-based languages develop tone as a result of long vowels and short vowels getting pronounced differently when they are stressed. There are many more, but at the end of the day it is important to realize that huge parts of the world have mostly tonal languages, and it is in many ways just normal. If you want to learn a tonal language, there are many different kinds to choose from.

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About Paul

Paul is currently a grad student in Computational Linguistics. His main interests are in Semitic languages and philosophy, and loves a good cup of coffee to go with them.