Editing Tone (linguistics) (section)

==Uses of tone==
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be [[homonyms]]. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and [[Hmong language|Hmong]].

However, in many African languages, especially in the [[Niger–Congo]] family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the [[Kru languages]], a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, which are inflected to indicate [[grammatical tense|tense and mood]], [[grammatical person|person]], and [[Grammatical polarity|polarity]], so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go".

In [[Yoruba language|Yoruba]], much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "[[talking drum]]s", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language,<ref name="Adekanmbi_1989">{{cite journal |last1=Adekanmbi |first1=Adetokunbo |date=March 1989 |title=Tones of Yoruba Language |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24537005 |journal=Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences |volume=79 |issue=1 |pages=29–34 |jstor=24537005 |access-date=2024-06-14}}</ref> or by [[Whistled language|whistling]] the tones of speech.{{Citation needed|date=January 2019}}

Note that tonal languages are not distributed evenly across the same range as non-tonal languages.<ref name="Maddieson">{{cite book|last=Maddieson|first=Ian|chapter=Tone|editor1-last=Dryer|editor1-first=Matthew S.|editor2-last=Haspelmath|editor2-first=Martin|title=The World Atlas of Language Structures Online|chapter-url=http://wals.info/chapter/13|location=Leipzig|publisher=Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology|year=2013|url=http://wals.info/|access-date=2020-09-19 |archive-date=2011-02-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110226184610/http://wals.info/|url-status=live}}</ref> Instead, the majority of tone languages belong to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Vietic groups, which are then composed by a large majority of tone languages and dominate a single region. Only in limited locations (South Africa, New Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others) do tone languages occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, it may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when one examines the distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality but simply have relatively few members, and for some North American tone languages, multiple independent origins are suspected.

If generally considering only complex-tone vs. no-tone, it might be concluded that tone is almost always an ancient feature within a language family that is highly conserved among members. However, when considered in addition to "simple" tone systems that include only two tones, tone, as a whole, appears to be more labile, appearing several times within Indo-European languages, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families.<ref name="Maddieson" /> That may indicate that rather than a trait unique to some language families, tone is a latent feature of most language families that may more easily arise and disappear as languages change over time.{{sfnp|Hombert|Ohala|Ewan|1979}}

A 2015 study by [[Caleb Everett]] argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If the conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it.<ref>{{cite journal |pmc=4321236|year=2015|last1=Everett|first1=C.|title=Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots|journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences|volume=112|issue=5|pages=1322–1327|last2=Blasi|first2=D. E.|last3=Roberts|first3=S. G.|doi=10.1073/pnas.1417413112|bibcode=2015PNAS..112.1322E|pmid=25605876|doi-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |title=Wet Is Better for Tonal Languages |first=Sarah |last=Lewin |date=April 1, 2015 |journal=Scientific American|volume=312 |issue=4 |pages=19 |doi=10.1038/scientificamerican0415-19 }}</ref> The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars.<ref>{{cite journal |year=2016|last1=Gussenhoven |first1=Carlos |title=Commentary: Tonal complexity in non-tonal languages |journal=Journal of Language Evolution |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=62–64 |doi=10.1093/jole/lzv016|doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |year=2016|last1=Ladd |first1=D. Robert |title=Commentary: Tone languages and laryngeal precision |journal=Journal of Language Evolution |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=70–72 |doi=10.1093/jole/lzv014|doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |pmc=5826341 |year=2018|last1=Roberts|first1=Seán G.|title=Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation|journal=Frontiers in Psychology|volume=9 |pages=166| doi=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00166 |pmid=29515487|doi-access=free}}</ref>