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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflection words. All oral 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 of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East Asia and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific islands.
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.
Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
| ! 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 | |
| ngang "flat" | A1 | default | mid level | (33) or (44) | ◌ | ma | |
| huyền "deep" | A2 | 2 / f / ` | low falling (breathy) | (31) or (21) | ◌̀ | mà | |
| sắc "sharp" | B1 | 1 / s / ' | mid rising, tense | (35) or (45) | ◌́ | má | |
| nặng "heavy" | B2 | 5 / j / . | mid falling, glottalized, heavy | (3ˀ2ʔ) or (3ˀ1ʔ) | (12) or (212) | ़ | mạ |
| hỏi "asking" | C1 | 3 / r / ? | mid falling(-rising), emphasis | (313) or (323) or (31) | (324) or (214) | ◌̉ | mả |
| ngã "tumbling" | C2 | 4 / x / ~ | mid rising, glottalized | (3ˀ5) or (4ˀ5) | ◌̃ | mã | |
Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels:
These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription:
These may be combined into a tongue-twister:
See also one-syllable article.
A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is:
Tone is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu languages and Kru languages, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian. It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which is the case in Punjabi language.
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.
| +Tone plus intonation in Thai |
With convoluted intonation, it appears that high and falling tone conflate, while the low tone with convoluted intonation has the same contour as rising tone with rising intonation.
In the most widely spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their distinctive shape, known as contour, with each tone having a different internal pattern of rising and falling pitch. Many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone. Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance (such as changing a verb to a noun or vice versa).
Most tonal languages have a combination of register and contour tones. Tone is typical of languages including Kra–Dai, Vietic languages, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, such as Cantonese, which produces three varieties of contour tone at three different pitch levels, and the Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench language, which employs five level tones and one or two rising tones across levels.
Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone (usually in long vowels). In such systems there is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine relative-pitch and contour tones, such as many Kru languages and other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa.
Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi language, for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones.
Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example, a number of Mandarin Chinese suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin Chinese) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable:
| + Realization of neutral tones in Mandarin Chinese
! Tone in isolation
! Tone pattern with added neutral tone ! Example ! Pinyin ! English meaning | ||||
| high | 玻璃 | bōli | glass | |
| rising | 伯伯 | bóbo | elder uncle | |
| dipping | 喇叭 | lǎba | horn | |
| falling | 兔子 | tùzi | rabbit |
After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid-register tonethe default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: the contour remains the same () whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words, the tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive.
Several Kam–Sui languages of southern China have nine contrastive tones, including contour tones. For example, the Kam language has 9 tones: 3 more-or-less fixed tones (high, mid and low); 4 unidirectional tones (high and low rising, high and low falling); and 2 bidirectional tones (dipping and peaking). This assumes that are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. For example, in the traditional reckoning, the Kam language has 15 tones, but 6 occur only in syllables closed with the voiceless , or and the other 9 occur only in syllables not ending in one of these sounds.
Preliminary work on the Wobe language (part of the Wee continuum) of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the Ticuna language of the Amazon and the of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more. The Guere language, Dan language and Mano language of Liberia and Ivory Coast have around 10 tones, give or take. The Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have a huge number of tones as well. The most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not east Asia.
Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones; the effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing.
Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after the original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called .
However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, 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 Yoruba language, 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 "", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech.
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 Vietic 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 occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, it may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when one examines the distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality but simply have relatively few members, and 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 languages, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families. That 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.
A 2015 study by Caleb Everett argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If the conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it. The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars.
| + Forms of 'bend' in Tlatepuzco Chinantec ! scope="col" | ! scope="col" 1 SG ! scope="col" | 1 PL ! scope="col" | 2 ! scope="col" | 3 |
In Iau language (the most tonally complex Lakes Plain language, predominantly monosyllabic), nouns have an inherent tone (e.g. be˧ 'fire' but be˦˧ 'flower'), but verbs don't have any inherent tone. For verbs, a tone is used to mark aspect. The first work that mentioned this was published in 1986. Example paradigms:
| + Aspects in Iau ! Tone !! Aspect !! ba 'come' !! tai 'moving s.t. toward' !! da 'locate s.t. inside' |
| da˦ 'ate, put it in (stomach)' |
| da˧ 'has been loaded onto s.t.' |
| da˨˧ 'dip into water, wash s.t.' |
| da˦˨ 'eaten it all up' |
| da˦˧ 'still eating it up' |
Tones are used to differentiate Grammatical case as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania):
| + Case difference in Maasai ! scope="col" | gloss ! scope="col" | Nominative ! scope="col" | Accusative |
Certain varieties of Chinese are known to express meaning by means of tone change although further investigations are required. Examples from two Yue Chinese spoken in Guangdong Province are shown below.Chen, Matthew Y. (2000). Tone Sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. In Taishanese, tone change indicates the grammatical number of personal pronouns. In Zhongshan, perfective verbs are marked with tone change.
| 'I' (singular) |
| 'we' (plural) |
| 'go' |
| 'gone' (perfective) |
The following table compares the personal pronouns of Sixian dialect (a dialect of Taiwanese Hakka) with Zaiwa and Jingpho (both Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Yunnan and Myanmar). From this table, we find the distinction between nominative, genitive, and accusative is marked by tone change and sound alternation.
| + Comparison of personal pronouns ! scope="col" | ! scope="col" Sixian dialect ! scope="col" | Zaiwa language ! scope="col" | Jingpho language |
A phonemic notation will typically lack any consideration of the actual phonetic values of the tones. Such notations are especially common when comparing dialects with wildly different phonetic realizations of what are historically the same set of tones. In Chinese, for example, the "four tones" may be assigned numbers, such as ① to ④ or – after the historical tone split that affected all Chinese languages to at least some extent – ① to ⑧ (with odd numbers for the yin tones and even numbers for the yang). In traditional Chinese notation, the equivalent diacritics are attached to the Chinese character, marking the same distinctions, plus underlined for the yang tones where a split has occurred. If further splits occurred in some language or dialect, the results may be numbered '4a' and '4b' or something similar. Among the Kra-Dai languages, tones are typically assigned the letters A through D, or, after a historical tone split similar to what occurred in Chinese, A1 to D1 and A2 to D2; see Proto-Tai language. With such a system, it can be seen which words in two languages have the same historical tone (say tone ③) even though they no longer sound anything alike.
Also phonemic are upstep and downstep, which are indicated by the IPA diacritics and , respectively, or by the typographic substitutes and , respectively. Upstep and downstep affect the tones within a language as it is being spoken, typically due to grammatical inflection or when certain tones are brought together. (For example, a high tone may be stepped down when it occurs after a low tone, compared to the pitch it would have after a mid tone or another high tone.)
Phonetic notation records the actual relative pitch of the tones. Since tones tend to vary over time periods as short as centuries, this means that the historical connections among the tones of two language varieties will generally be lost by such notation, even if they are dialects of the same language.
| +Conventions for five-pitch transcription |
An IPA/Chao tone letter will rarely be composed of more than three elements (which are sufficient for peaking and dipping tones). Occasionally, however, peaking–dipping and dipping–peaking tones, which require four elements – or even double-peaking and double-dipping tones, which require five – are encountered. This is usually only the case when prosody is superposed on lexical or grammatical tone, but a good computer font will allow an indefinite number of tone letters to be concatenated. The IPA diacritics placed over vowels and other letters have not been extended to this level of complexity.
| High tone | acute | á |
| Mid tone | macron | ā |
| Low tone | grave | à |
Minor variations are common. In many three-tone languages, it is usual to mark high and low tone as indicated above but to omit marking of the mid tone: má (high), ma (mid), mà (low). Similarly, in two-tone languages, only one tone may be marked explicitly, usually the less common or more 'marked' tone (see markedness).
When digits are used, typically 1 is high and 5 is low, except in Omotic languages, where 1 is low and 5 or 6 is high. In languages with just two tones, 1 may be high and 2 low, etc.
More iconic systems use tone numbers or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as "Chao ". These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1 and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin Chinese tones are transcribed as follows (the tone letters will not display properly without a compatible font installed):
| +Tones of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) | High tone | 55 | (Tone 1) | |
| Mid rising tone | 35 | (Tone 2) | ||
| Low dipping tone | 21(4) | (Tone 3) | ||
| High falling tone | 51 | (Tone 4) |
IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising and falling , are widely supported by IPA fonts while several Chinese varieties have more than one rising or falling tone. One common workaround is to retain standard IPA and for high-rising (e.g. ) and high-falling (e.g. ) tones and to use the subscript diacritics and for low-rising (e.g. ) and low-falling (e.g. ) tones.
In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for high tone and /5/ stands for low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages for which /1/ may be low tone and /3/ high tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use or after a vowel to indicate low tone. The Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo language and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having two tones: high and low. One variety of Hopi language has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language.
Standard Central Thai language has five tones–mid, low, falling, high and rising–often indicated respectively by the numbers zero, one, two, three and four. The Thai alphabet is an abugida, which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel length, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant. The Shan alphabet, derived from the Burmese alphabet, has five tone letters: , , , , ; a sixth tone is unmarked.
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and its six tones are marked by letters with above or below a certain vowel. Basic notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:
| + Tones of Vietnamese ! align="center" | Name ! align="center" | Contour ! align="center" | Diacritic ! align="center" | Example |
| ngang | mid level, | not marked | a | |
| huyền | low falling, | grave accent | à | |
| sắc | high rising, | acute accent | á | |
| hỏi | dipping, | hook above | ả | |
| ngã | creaky rising, | tilde | ã | |
| nặng | creaky falling, | dot below | ạ |
The Latin-based Hmong language and Iu Mien alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the tone) is left unwritten while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. That system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter keyboard without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.
The Standard Zhuang and Zhuang languages used to use a unique set of six "tone letters" based on the shapes of numbers, but slightly modified, to depict what tone a syllable was in. This was replaced in 1982 with the use of normal letters in the same manner, like Hmong.
The syllabary of the Nuosu language depicts tone in a unique manner, having separate glyphs for each tone other than for the mid-rising tone, which is denoted by the addition of a diacritic. Take the difference between ꉬ nge ŋɯ³³, and ꉫ ngex ŋɯ³⁴. In romanisation, the letters t, x, and p are used to demarcate tone. As codas are forbidden in Nuosu there is no ambiguity.
Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon language) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa language), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word ('water') is toneless in Hupa, high-tone in Navajo, and low-tone tù in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan ('knee') is toneless in Hupa, low-tone in Navajo, and high-tone in Slavey. provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high fundamental frequency, or creaky voice, which tends to produce a low fundamental frequency. Languages with "stiff" glottalized consonants and tense voice developed high tone on the preceding vowel and those with "slack" glottalized consonants with creaky voice developed low tone.
The Bantu languages also have "mirror" tone systems in which the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.
Three Algonquian languages developed tone independently of one another and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne, Arapaho language, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following h acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative. In Afrikaans the glottal fricative also lowers the tone of surrounding vowels.
In Mohawk language, a glottal stop can disappear in a combination of , leaving behind a long falling tone. Note that it has the reverse effect of the postulated rising tone in Cantonese or Middle Chinese, derived from a lost final glottal stop.
In Korean language, a 2013 study which compared voice recordings of Seoul speech from 1935 and 2005 found that in recent years, lenis consonants (ㅂㅈㄷㄱ), aspirated consonants (ㅍㅊㅌㅋ) and fortis consonants (ㅃㅉㄸㄲ) were shifting from a distinction via voice onset time to that of pitch change, and suggests that the modern Seoul dialect is currently undergoing tonogenesis. These sound shifts still show variations among different speakers, suggesting that the transition is still ongoing. Among 141 examined Seoul speakers, these pitch changes were originally initiated by females born in the 1950s, and have almost reached completion in the speech of those born in the 1990s.
This process happened in the Punjabi language: the Punjabi breathy voice (voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a low tone; at the end, it left behind a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch and did not interfere with the low and high tones. That produced a tone of its own, mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Punjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked. The written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.
Similarly, final or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then lenition to and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with Chinese. Two of the three tones of Middle Chinese, the "rising" and the "departing" tones, arose as the Old Chinese final consonants and disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most varieties descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split in which each tone divided in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced. Vowels following a voiced consonant (depressor consonant) acquired a lower tone as the voicing lost its distinctiveness.
The same changes affected many other languages in the same area, and at around the same time (AD 1000–1500). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai language and Vietnamese.
In general, voiced initial consonants lead to low tones while vowels after aspirated consonants acquire a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high or rising tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone so if the glottal stop causes vowel glottalization, that will tend to leave behind a low vowel). A final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as can be seen in the case of Burmese.
| + Tonogenesis in White Hmong | ||||||||
| Atonal stage | CV | CVʔ | CVh | CVCvl | ||||
| Tonogenesis | CV level | CV rising | CV falling | CVCvl atonal | ||||
| D2 lower | ||||||||
The table below shows the tonogenesis of the Vietnamese language. The tone values are taken from James Kirby.
| + Tonogenesis in Vietnamese | ||||||
| Atonal stage | CV | CVx > CVʔ | CVs > CVh | |||
| Tonogenesis | CV mid | CV rising | CV falling | |||
| C2 lower | ||||||
| ngã | ||||||
The table below is the tonogenesis of Tai Dam (Black Tai). Displayed in the first row is Proto-Southern Kra-Dai, as reconstructed by Peter K. Norquest.
| + Tonogenesis in Tai Dam | ||||||||
| Proto-SKD | *∅ | *-h | *-ʔ | *-ʔ͡C | ||||
| Tonogenesis | level | rising | falling | |||||
| D2 | ||||||||
The table below shows the tonogenesis of the .
| + Tonogenesis in Chinese | ||||||||
| Atonal stage | ||||||||
| Tonogenesis | 平 píng (level) | 上 shǎng (rising) | 去 qù (departing) | 入 rù (entering) | ||||
| D2 | ||||||||
The tone values are listed below:
| + Tone values of modern Chinese lects |
The tones across all varieties (or ) of Chinese correspond to each other, although they may not correspond to each other perfectly. Moreover, listed above are citation tones, but in actual conversations, obligatory tone sandhi rules will reshape them. The Sixian and Hailu Hakka in Taiwan are famous for their near-regular and opposite pattern (of pitch height). Both will be compared with Standard Chinese below.
| loMF nginLL gaLR |
| vonMF gungLR |
| caLR zamHL |
| ciiHL hangLL caLR |
| +Tonogenesis in Punjabi | Atonal stage | C(V)VC̬ʰ(V)V | C̬ʰ(V)VC(V)V | C(V)VC(V)V | |||
| Tonogenesis | C̬ʰ → V́C̬V̀
/ V_V | C̬ʰVC(V)V | C̬ʰVVC(V)V | - | |||
| C̬ʰ → T̥V, R̬V / #_V | C̬ʰVV → T̥VV̀, R̬VV̀ / #_VV | ||||||
| Result | C(V)V́C̬(V)V̀ | T̥VC(V)V | R̬VC(V)V | T̥VV̀C(V)V | R̬VV̀C(V)V | C(V)VC(V)V | |
Examples in Norwegian: 'bønder (farmers) and ៴bønner (beans) are, apart from the intonation, phonetically identical (despite the spelling difference). Similarly, and with in this case identical spelling, 'tømmer (timber) and ៴tømmer (present tense of verb tømme – to empty) are distinguished only through intonation.
The Scandinavian tone system is more correctly described as a pitch accent system because it only appears in combination with stress. It became phonemic because the number of syllables in certain words changed since the Old Norse period. A former one-syllable word which developed an additional syllable because of an epenthetic vowel or an added suffix kept its one-syllable pronunciation in contrast with a former two-syllable word that it was otherwise homophonous with. It previously also existed in Danish but has in nearly all forms of Danish developed into stød which is a rather a difference in vowel phonation but morphologically also behaves like a pitch accent.
A pitch accent system also developed within the Balto-Slavic languages and still exists in Lithuanian, Latvian (with one tone resembling the Danish stød), Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian.
According to Watson, Scouse contrasts certain tones, and some forms of Rhineland German can also be described as having a pitch accent system.
In some cases, it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. For example, the Ket language of Siberia has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, as having four tones by others, but by some as having no tone at all. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on the researcher's interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation (creaky, murmured or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, in which case Burmese would not be phoneme tonal, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone, in which case it would be considered tonal. Something similar appears to be the case with Ket.
The 19th-century constructed language Solresol can consist of only tone, but unlike all natural tonal languages, Solresol's tone is absolute, rather than relative, and no tone sandhi occurs.
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