Editing Tone (linguistics) (section)

===Tone sandhi===
{{Main|Tone sandhi}}
In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into a different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin Chinese, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很 {{IPA|[xɤn˨˩˦]}} ('very') and 好 {{IPA|[xaʊ˨˩˦]}} ('good') produce the phrase 很好 {{IPA|[xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦]}} ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as {{IPA|[xɤn˨˩˦꜔꜒xaʊ˨˩˦]}}.

====Right- and left-dominant sandhi====
Tone sandhi in [[Varieties of Chinese|Sinitic languages]] can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of the word must take their sandhi form.<ref name="Zhang 2007 pp. 259–302">{{cite journal | last=Zhang | first=Jie | title=A directional asymmetry in Chinese tone sandhi systems | journal=Journal of East Asian Linguistics | publisher=Springer Science and Business Media LLC | volume=16 | issue=4 | date=2007-08-23 | issn=0925-8558 | doi=10.1007/s10831-007-9016-2 | pages=259–302| s2cid=2850414 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal| issn = 1836-6821| last = Rose| first = Phil| title = Complexities of tonal realisation in a right-dominant Chinese Wu dialect - disyllabic tone sandhi in a speaker form Wencheng| journal = Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society |volume=9 |pages=48-80| accessdate = 2023-07-22| date = March 2016| url = https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/99985}}</ref> [[Taiwanese Hokkien|Taiwanese Southern Min]] is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam<sup>5</sup> 'salty'; 酸sng<sup>1</sup> 'sour'; 甜tinn<sup>1</sup> 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam<sub>7</sub> sng<sub>7</sub> tinn<sup>1</sup> 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone.