ABSTRACT
A large number of tone languages are distributed throughout Asia. However, despite an abundant amount of descriptive studies on tone inventories of individual languages in the region, our understanding of the characteristics of tones in Asian languages still remains limited due to the paucity of comparative research. Adopting phonological typology as a tool to measure the complexity of tone systems, this chapter presents quantitative analyses of tones collected from the cross-linguistic database and published data on Asian tone languages. It finds that while the distribution of tone types is inversely related with markedness, Asian tone languages generally have more contour tones with larger tone inventories, and that a higher pitch register tends to be utilized more frequently in various tone types. This chapter further addresses the tonal diversity of less known Asian languages that awaits further research.
