Question

My language is Chinese.

Question: Describe how tone is used in your own language. Is tone grammatical? Vocabulary? The way you speak? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

Tones. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. In order to differentiate meaning, the same syllable can be pronounced with different tones. Mandarin's tones give it a very distinctive quality, but the tones can also be a source of miscommunication if not given due attention.

Mandarin is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation in which a sound is spoken affects the meaning. For example, if you say t?ng with a high tone it means ‘soup’, but táng with a rising tone means ‘sugar’. In Mandarin Chinese, there are four basic pitched tones and a fifth neutral (toneless) tone.

The official transcription system for learning how to pronounce Chinese tones is the Pinyin alphabet, which was developed in China at the end of the 1950s. This phonetic system transcribes the Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet, and includes marks above the vowels to indicate tone.

You can tell which tone to give a syllable from the diacritic marks above the vowels in pinyin, as below:

First: d? – high and level

Second: dá – starts medium in tone, then rises to the top

Third: d? – starts low, dips to the bottom, then rises toward the top

Fourth: dà – starts at the top, then falls sharp and strong to the bottom

Neutral: da – flat, with no emphasis.

In Chinese, if you get the intonation of a word wrong, you might end up saying the wrong thing. For example, ‘w? xi?ng wèn n?’, means ’I want to ask you’. Simple enough! But if you were to say ‘w? xi?ng w?n n?’, it would mean ’I want to kiss you’!