Tone (linguistics)  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump
to: navigation, search  The four main tones of Standard Mandarin
pronounced with the syllable 'ma':  Tone is the use of pitch in
language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that
is, to distinguish or to inflect words.[1] All verbal languages
use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic
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. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called
tonemes [ˈtəʊniːm],[2] where each toneme is a lexically distinct
variant of the same phoneme, that is phonetically distinguished
from other tonemes only by the tone of the vowel. Tonal
languages are extremely common in Africa, East Asia, and Central
America,[1] but rare elsewhere in Asia and in Europe; as many as
seventy percent of world languages may be tonal.[1]  In many
tonal African langua