What Are Tonal Languages?

by Target Language Translation Services

- December 31 2021

Learning another language is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but a particularly cool thing to observe is how other languages do things that your mother tongue doesn’t. A phenomenon particularly interesting to people who don’t speak them is tonal languages, or tone languages.

If you know only one thing about tonal languages, it’s probably that Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese are tonal. There’s a lot more to it than that, such as Vietnamese, Punjabi, or even Ancient Greek--to name just a few. To the untrained ear it is not obvious how tones are used in other languages. In fact, a tone in the wrong place, or ignored completely could mean a sentence changing its meaning drastically, or becoming entirely incomprehensible.

What Are Tonal Languages?

Put simply, a tone is a change or stress in pitch to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. Tones are predominantly employed in languages which have multiple meanings for one word, so as to distinguish meaning through either pronunciation or written accents.

The Vietnamese equivalent--“Bấy nay bây bầy bảy bẫy bậy”--translates to “all along you’ve set up the seven traps incorrectly”, and showcases the language’s full tonal variety.

Another common example of this to cite is the Mandarin Chinese ma. “Mā”, which translates to “mum” / “mama”, employs the Mandarin high-level tone, distinguished by a line above the vowel. A mid to high level pitch rise is used in “má”, changing the meaning of the word to “hemp”. Employing a low tone with a single fall over the vowel in “mǎ” changes the meaning to “horse”. “Mà”, with a short sharply falling tone means “scold”. The untoned “ma” is simply an interrogative particle. In all, Mandarin has five tones (or four tones and one neutral tone).

Each language treats tone differently. Some languages, including Thai and Vietnamese, can go all the way up to 7 or 8 tones, though it does seem to max out around there.

Why Are Some Languages Tonal?

Tonal languages are spoken all over the world, but are clustered in three places: east and south east Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the indigenous communities of Mexico. One thing these regions have in common is heat. Studies have shown that there’s a link between the development of tonal languages and humidity. Places that have a lot of humidity are home to more tonal languages. Moist air allows vocal folds to move more freely, which is vital in tonal languages because you need to be able to consistently hit the right tone for what you’re saying to make sense. But while conjecture has arisen from this fact, it only gets us so far.

In fact, there’s a simple and interesting reason as to how some languages develop tones--the random evolution of language. All languages start off as dialects that become more and more differentiated in tiny gradual stages over a very long time. One essential and universal aspect to how languages change is that of consonants tending to fall away from the beginning and ends of words. Consonants morph gradually and eventually fall from words in all languages all the time, in ways that are generally predictable and well-documented.

An example of this can be seen in a Cockney English speaker’s pronunciation of “breath” as “bref”--the result of a perfectly normal gradual changing of consonants. So, imagine there’s a group of words, with the same vowel sound but a different consonant at the end or beginning. A good example here would be the English words “pay” and “bay”. At first appearance the only difference between these words is the first letter. In fact, due to the way we form sounds in the larynx, English speakers tend to say the “ay” after a “b” at a slightly lower pitch.

This difference isn’t noticeable in everyday speech. However, if after a very long time and many changes those consonants were to drop, as they tend to do, you would end up with two words, with the same spelling, but said at different tones and meaning quite different things, with only the tone to distinguish them. These tones over time become an essential part of the language, and are passed down and subjected themselves to the tiny changes that cumulatively go towards the formation of new languages. Actually, languages can gain or lose tone over time; some varieties of Norwegian are starting to lose their tonal distinctions. While there’s still some controversy here, this is currently the best explanation linguistics has for why some languages have tones.

This article is reprinted from Babbel and translations.co.uk.

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