ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a much neglected but very necessary aspect of the topic, namely grassroots fieldwork on tone. It provides both general information about tone languages particularly regarding typological insights and practical methodology for doing fieldwork. The chapter discusses various ways of transcribing tone and the distinction between surface and underlying tones is very important and floating tones as well as toneless morphemes. The use of distinctive tone concentrated in three language areas: a group of American Indian languages, many African languages, and nearly all Sino-Tibetan languages. Tone languages are not a rare phenomenon among the languages of the world. Pitch, tone, and stress are word-prosodic features; intonation is a prosodic feature that is realized on a larger unit: phrase, clause, or sentence. Linguists who have a non-tonal language as their mother tongue may wonder how they can hear and mimic the different tones of a tone language.
