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Tonality is different from intonation, which is present in every language. For example, a rising pitch at the end of a sentence often indicates a question, while a falling pitch indicates a statement. Intonation is a variable feature of phrases and sentences, while tonality is a fixed feature of individual words.
Geography of tonality
In Europe, only Norwegian, Swedish, Scottish Gaelic, Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, the Limburgish dialect of Dutch and some dialects of Slovenian possess tonality, and only Lithuanian regularly marks it in text other than in dictionaries. The tones of Lithuanian are believed to be especially authentic, as they agree for the most part with the tones of Vedic Sanskrit, its ancient cousin. Another tonal language spoken in the Indian subcontinent is Punjabi.
Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa (notably excepting Swahili in the East, and Wolof and Fulani in the West) are tonal. Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the Semitic languages, which are not.
In East Asia, most languages are tonal. Korean, Khmer, and for the most part, Japanese are not. However, Korean did possess tonality as recently as 500 years ago, as it was indicated in the Hangul spelling system. In Tibetan, which is riven by dialects because of the harsh geography of Tibet, the Central and Eastern dialects (including that of the capital Lhasa), are tonal, while the dialects of the West are not. Much speculation has been generated over the reasons for this partial tonogenesis.
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. Among the Mayan languages, which are mostly atonal, Yucatec, with the largest number of speakers, has developed five tones.
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. 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. In French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final syllable has high pitch. Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. 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 simple scheme, whereby individual syllables in a word are at a fixed pitch. High and low pitch are always permissible, and sometimes a middle level of pitch occurs as well. Some are a bit complex too. In Yoruba there are three pitches middle,low, and high and the meaning of a word is determined by the pitch on the vowels. For example, the word "owo" in Yoruba could mean "broom", "hand", or "respect" depending on how you pitch the vowels. 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.
Ancient Greek had a tonal pattern wherein, in isolated words, exactly one mora was high, and the others low. A short vowel was a single mora, and was therefore high or low, whereas a long vowel was two mora, and could therefore be low, rise from low to high or go down 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. By the start of middle-ages, this tonic accent system had been corrupted to a stress accent system, but remained recorded in written Greek until the 20th century.
In the Japanese of Tokyo, tonal patterns are adapted to multi-syllable words. Every word must contain a single continuous chain of high pitched syllables, beginning with either the first or second syllable. Syllables preceding and following this chain, if any, must be low. E.g., the city name Kyoto has tone kyoOto, with the pitch pattern low-high-low. The words for "chopstick", "bridge" and "edge" all have the consonant-vowel structure hashi, but the first has the pitch pattern high-low, the second low-high, and the third also low-high but 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 Yucatec, Thai, Vietnamese and the many Chinese "dialects". In Standard Thai, every word has one of five associated contours: high even, middle even, low even, rising, or falling. Mandarin has four tones, similar to Thai's without the middle tone. Cantonese has at least 8 tonal contours: high even, high falling, high rising, middle even, middle rising, low even, low falling and low rising. Two of them (high even and middle rising) are 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.
Theories of tonogenesis
Because languages can both acquire tonality (like Hausa or Yucatec Maya) and lose it (like Korean), linguists have speculated on its origin. From comparison of the Tibetan dialects with and without tone, it appears that initial voiced consonants are associated with a low pitch register, while unvoiced ones associate with high. Also, the loss of final consonants in Central Tibetan (which are preserved in the atonal dialects and in the spelling of Ancient Tibetan), suggests that such loss gives rise to tonal contours. 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.
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. Even Pinyin, the current official Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, is commonly printed in most publications without tone marks. This makes the Chinese words much harder to identify correctly; a parallel 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. So too, Yoruba, almost alone among the tonal languages of Africa, is often written with tonal marks. The tonal marking of Navajo is especially elegant, as only a single diacritic is needed to mark high, low, rising and falling tones.
However, all language spellings are inadequate in some way. Most languages of the Semitic family (e.g., the Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets) are written with most of the vowels left unexpressed; this tendency is found as far back as Ancient Egyptian. Stress is not indicated in languages as distinct as English, Russian and Tagalog, even though stressing different syllables can indicate different words (e.g. convict vs. convict, or present vs. present).
Pronouncing tonality
The difficulty of pronouncing and of recognizing tonal patterns in words is greatly exaggerated. Like any other unfamiliar linguistic feature, such as aspiration, retroflexion or velarization, it can be taught and learned. Initially, tonal patterns can be sung like musical passages; then, the extreme range of pitch can be narrowed into that of ordinary speech. Since tonal languages often have long and short vowels, the analogy to teaching music, with both pitch and rhythm, is especially close.
See also
"Tonal language"