ABSTRACT

Language in which tone contours have phonological relevance, that is, make a difference in meaning, cf. Chinese and Vietnamese. ( also tone)

References

tonology

Phonologically distinctive change in pitch. In tonal languages this distinctiveness is found on the lexical level, in intonational languages on the syntactic and pragmatic levels. ( also intonation, intonational phrase. pitch accent, stress2)

1 (also sound) In acoustic phonetics, term for occurrence of sounds with simple, period waves.