ABSTRACT
Tone is an integral part of many of the world’s languages, yet tone variation is understudied, especially in acoustic sociophonetics. This chapter outlines the exciting opportunities and challenges involved with studying tone in a sociophonetic framework, along with reviews of prior studies and analytical approaches. These variationist approaches to tone, which we call “sociotonetics,” combine methods from tone phonetics and sociophonetics toward the goal of fine-grained empirical analyses. Using sociotonetics, we then outline a case study of a tone split-in-progress in Yangliu Lalo (southwest China), which illustrates how researchers can investigate tone as a sociophonetic variable and uncover new insights about language variation and change from a tonal perspective.
