Tonal language - Citizendia

A tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words Tone is a phonological trait common to many languages around the world (though rare in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific). Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning The Middle East is a Subcontinent with no clear boundaries often used as a synonym to Near East, in opposition to Far East. The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth 's Oceanic divisions Chinese is perhaps the most well-known of such languages.

1 Geography of tonality
2 Patterns of tonality
3 Theories of tonogenesis
4 Notational systems
5 Left-Brained and Right-Brained Dominance in Tonal Language Processing
6 References
7 See also

Geography of tonality

In Europe, Norwegian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Limburgish (a Franconian language), Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, some dialects of Slovene possess elements of tonality, but this is in most cases better understood as a pitch accent. Norwegian ( norsk) is a North Germanic Language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language Swedish ( is a North Germanic language spoken by more than nine million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the Lithuanian ( lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. Limburgish, or Limburgian or Limburgic ( Dutch: Limburgs, German: Limburgisch, French: Limbourgeois 300px|right|thumb|The Franconian languages in Europe|'''Legend'''{{legend|#a0f288|Low Franconian dialects in [[the Netherlands]] Serbian (sr-Cyrl српски језик sr-Latn ''srpski jezik'' is a South Slavic language, Croatian language ( hrvatski jezik) is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina in neighbouring Bosnian language (Bosnian bosanski jezik) sometimes referred as Bosniak language or Bosniac language is a South Slavic language native Slovene or Slovenian ( slovenski jezik or slovenščina, not to be confused with Slovenčina) is a South Slavic language Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a Syllable Another Indo-European tonal language, spoken in the Indian subcontinent, is Punjabi. This article deals with the geophysical region in Asia For geopolitical treatments see South Asia. Punjabi (pa ਪੰਜਾਬੀ in Gurmukhi script pa-PK {{Nastaliq پنجابی}} in Shahmukhi script Pañjābī in Transliteration) is an

Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa (notably excepting Swahili in the East, and Wolof and Fulani in the West) are tonal. Sub-Saharan Africa is a geographical term used to describe the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara, or those African countries Swahili (called Kiswahili in the language itself is the First language of the Swahili people (Waswahili who inhabit several large stretches The Fula language is a language of West Africa, spoken by the Ful{{IPA|ɓ}}e (Fula or Fulani people from Senegambia and Guinea to Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the Semitic languages, which are not. Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers spoken as a first Language by about 24 million people and as a second language by about 15 The Semitic languages are a Language family whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East,

There are numerous tonal languages in East Asia, including all the Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, and Burmese (but not Mongolian, Khmer, Malay, standard Japanese or standard Korean). Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and Lao or Laotian (BGN/PCGN phasa lao IPA: pʰaːsaː laːw is a Tonal Language of the Tai-Kadai language family The Burmese language (မြန်မာဘာသာ myà̃mà bàθà MLCTS: myanma bhasa) is the official Language of Burma. The Mongolian language (mn [[ImageMonggol kelesvg 17px]] Mongɣol kele, Cyrillic: Монгол хэл Mongol khel) is the best-known member of Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. The Malay language ( ISO 639-1 code MS is an Austronesian language spoken by the Malay people and people of other ethnic groups who reside in the is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system In Tibet, the Central and Eastern dialects of Tibetan (including that of the capital Lhasa) are tonal, while the dialects of the West are not. Definitions of Tibet See also Definitions of Tibet Name In English The English word Tibet, like the word for Tibet in most European Tibetan refers to a group of languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia as well as by overseas Lhasa, ( in English l̥ʰásə or in Tibetan; Chinese: 拉萨 Pinyin: Lāsà sometimes spelled Lasa, is the administrative capital of the

Many of the languages of New Guinea are tonal, such as those of the Eastern Highlands and the Sko and Lakes Plain families. New Guinea, located just north of Australia, is the world's second largest island, having become separated from the Australian mainland when the area now known Trans–New Guinea (TNG is a Hypothetical family of Papuan languages spoken in New Guinea and neighboring islands The Sko or Skou languages are a small Language family spoken by about 7000 people mainly along the coast of Sandaun Province in Papua New Guinea The Lakes Plain languages are a small family of Papuan languages.

Some of the native languages of North and South America possess tonality, especially the Na-Dené languages of Alaska and the American Southwest (including Navajo), and the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico. Alaska ( Аляска Alyaska) is a state in the United States of America, in the northwest of the North American continent The Southwestern area of the United States could be defined as the states west of the Mississippi River, with the qualification of a certain northern limit such as the 37 Navajo or Navaho ( native name: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock spoken in the southwest United States by Oto-Manguean languages (also Otomanguean) are a large family comprised of several families of Native American languages. Among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec (with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil, have developed tones. Yucatec Maya ("Maaya T'aan" in the revised Orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala) is a Mayan language spoken in The Uspanteko (Uspanteco Uspanteko Uspantec is a Mayan language of Guatemala, closely related to K'iche'. Tzotzil (native name Bats'i k'op; IPA k'opʰ is a Maya language spoken by the indigenous Tzotzil Maya people in the Mexican

Patterns of tonality

Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In English, one or more syllables are given an accent, which can consist of a loud stress, a lengthened vowel, and a high pitch, or any combination of these. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States In Linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain Syllables in a word In Linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a Vowel sound Pitch represents the perceived Fundamental frequency of a sound In tonal languages, the pitch accent must be present, but the others are optional. For example, in Czech and Hungarian, the first syllable of each word is stressed, but any syllable may be lengthened, and pitch is not used. Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the Hungarian ( magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. In French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final or penultimate syllable has higher pitch. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people In Linguistics, the penult is the Penultimate Syllable of a word that is the second-to-last syllable Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. Turkish ( tr Türkçe IPA) is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. None of these languages are considered tonal, and there is much discussion about how much prominence pitch must have in order to label a language tonal.

Many sub-Saharan languages (such as Hausa) have a scheme in which individual syllables in a word have a fixed pitch. Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers spoken as a first Language by about 24 million people and as a second language by about 15 High and low pitch are always permissible, and sometimes a middle level of pitch occurs as well. However, some are more complex. In Yoruba there are three pitches (high, low, and middle) and the meaning of a word is determined by the pitch on the vowels. Yoruba (native name èdè Yorùbá, 'the Yoruba language' is a Dialect continuum of West Africa with over 25 million speakers For example, the word "owo" in Yoruba could mean "broom", "hand", or "respect" depending on how the vowels are pitched. Also, "you" (singular) in Yoruba is o in a middle pitch, while the word for "he, she, it" is o in a high pitch. Change of pitch is used in some African languages (such as Luo) for grammatical purposes, such as marking past tense. Dholuo (also known as Luo IPA with tone marks) belongs to the Luo grouping within the Western Nilotic grouping of the Nilo-Saharan language family

Ancient Greek had a tonal pattern wherein, in isolated words, exactly one mora was high, and the others low. The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c Mora (plural moras or morae) is a unit of sound used in Phonology that determines Syllable weight (which in turn determines stress A short vowel formed a single mora, and therefore had only high or low tone, whereas a long vowel comprised two morae, and could therefore be low, or rising (from low to high), or falling (from high to low). Note that the scheme was more complex when words were grouped together, as they could form accentuation units with proclitic words at the start and enclitic words at the end, and such accentuation units could have multiple accents. In Linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent Word. In Linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent Word. By the start of the Middle Ages, this tonal accent system had been simplified to a stress accent system, but remained recorded in written Greek until the 1970's.

In the Japanese of Tokyo, tonal patterns are adapted to multi-syllable words. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities officially, is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan and located on the eastern side of the main island Honshū. Every word must contain a single continuous chain of high pitched moras, beginning with either the first or second mora. Moras preceding and following this chain, if any, must be low. E. g. , the city name Kyōto has tone KYOoto, with the pitch pattern high-low-low. (IPA /kʲoːto / is a city in the central part of the island of Honshū, Japan. The words for "chopstick", "edge" and "bridge" all have the consonant-vowel structure hashi, but the first has the pitch pattern high-low, the second low-high, while the third is also low-high but is followed by an obligatory low in the next word.

Tonal contours (rising, falling, or even more elaborate ones) are present in many languages, such as Thai, Vietnamese and the many Chinese dialects. Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) In Standard Thai, every word has one of five associated contours: high even, middle even, low even, rising, or falling. Northern varieties of Vietnamese has six tones which utilise pitch contours as well as phonations: mid level, low falling, high rising, mid dipping-rising, high creaky-rising (which is absent in the South) and low falling constricted. Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of Phonetics. Mandarin has four tones, similar to Thai's without the middle tone. Cantonese has at least 8 tonal contours: high even, high falling (which is becoming obsolete, and changing to high even), high rising, middle even, middle rising, low even, low falling and low rising. Two of them (high even and middle rising) are often superimposed upon words with other tone contours to indicate emotional closeness or familiarity, in a manner parallel to the diminutive suffixes of many Romance and Slavic languages. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages

Theories of tonogenesis

Because languages can both acquire tonality (like Hausa or Yucatec Maya) and lose it (like Korean and Ancient Greek), linguists have speculated on its origin. From comparison of the Tibetan dialects with and without tone, and of both with the spelling of Ancient Tibetan, it appears that initial voiced consonants are associated with a low pitch register, while unvoiced ones associate with high. Voice or voicing is a term used in Phonetics and Phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless Voice or voicing is a term used in Phonetics and Phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless Even though the voicing of the consonants has been lost, the pitch register remains. Also, the loss of final consonants in Central Tibetan (which are preserved in spelling and in the atonal dialects) suggests that such loss gives rise to tonal contours. In addition to Tibetan, both Chinese and Vietnamese are believed to have been atonal within the past two millennia, and to have developed their modern tonal systems in such a fashion.

More recently, a statistical analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh highlighted a correlation between the microcephaly genes MCPH1 and ASPM with the tonality of language ^[1]. Microcephaly is a Neurodevelopmental disorder in which the circumference of the head Microcephalin ( MCPH1) is one of six Genes causing primary Microcephaly ( when non-functional Mutations exist in the

Notational systems

Main article: Tone (linguistics)#Notational systems

Because the transcriptions of tonal languages in the Latin alphabet were often devised by untrained Europeans, who were largely unfamiliar with the phenomenon, most official spellings of such languages today simply omit all indication of tonality. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words Even Pinyin, the current official Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, is commonly printed in most publications without tone marks. Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan This makes the Chinese words much harder to identify correctly; a similar situation would arise if photographs of birds in birdwatching handbooks were printed in black and white instead of full color.

On the other hand, Vietnamese is written with quốc ngữ, a Latin-based alphabet that denotes tones using diacritical marks above or below the base vowels; this was possibly inspired by a similar system used to write Ancient Greek. The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters in collating order Description The Vietnamese alphabet called Chữ Quốc Ngữ Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. So too, Yoruba, almost alone among the tonal languages of Africa, is often written with tonal marks. The tonal marking of Navajo is especially simple, as only a single diacritic is needed to mark high, low, rising and falling tones. Navajo or Navaho ( native name: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock spoken in the southwest United States by

Left-Brained and Right-Brained Dominance in Tonal Language Processing

The left hemisphere has been thought since the 19th century to be dominant in speech perception^[2]. In English, pitch is used for determining sentence type (note the rise in pitch in: "is this a question"?) but in general pitch is prosodic. In Linguistics, prosody (from Greek προσωδία) is the Rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech However, Chinese uses pitch to make critical distinctions between words. Language researchers have argued about whether the defining qualities of tonal languages implied notable right-brained activity, or substantial bi-lateral brain activity (that is, using both sides of the brain), and different research techniques seemed to arrive at different conclusions. In 2006, researchers (^[3] and ^[4]) demonstrated that the tonal qualities of tonal languages as spoken by native speakers of the tonal language generate more right-brain activity as would be expected for "non speech" sounds with pitch but only for 200 milliseconds. After 200 milliseconds, the left brain hemisphere becomes dominant like other speech information. There are two implications of their research. First, there does appear to be some low-level specialized processing for pitch in the right-hemisphere with respect to sounds that could be speech, which explains some prior research that noted the increased activity in the right-brain in tonal language processing. However, this research suggests that after the brain tags the tonal information as content-level (meaning-level) information for Chinese native speakers, the information is dominantly processed in the left brain. Both sides are used throughout all steps of language processing, but the activity on one side or the other does appear, starting with right brain only briefly, followed by a much longer time with left hemisphere dominance.

References

^ Dediu, Dan & Ladd, D. Robert (2007), “Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin”, PNAS Early Edition, <http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0610848104v1.pdf>. Retrieved on 12 June 2007
^ http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5626&context=postprints
^ http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5626&context=postprints
^ (Chinese) Mandarin is music to the ears

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