Editing Tone (linguistics) (section)

===Tone orthographies===

In Roman script orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in [[pinyin]], but they tend to be omitted.<ref name=Dungan/> [[Thai alphabet|Thai]] uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in [[Hmong RPA]] and several minority languages in China. Tone may simply be ignored, as is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades. Likewise, Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. [[Dungan language|Dungan]], a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone.<ref name=Dungan>{{Cite web |url=http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html |title=''Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform'' |access-date=2009-01-25  |archive-date=2019-08-20  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190820221315/http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html |url-status=live }}</ref> [[Ndyuka language|Ndjuka]], in which tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.{{citation needed|date=March 2025}}

Standard Central [[Thai language|Thai]] has five tones–mid, low, falling, high and rising–often indicated respectively by the numbers zero, one, two, three and four. The [[Thai alphabet]] is an [[abugida|alphasyllabary]], which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel length, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant. The [[Shan alphabet]], derived from the [[Burmese alphabet|Burmese script]], has five tone letters: {{shn|ႇ}}, {{shn|ႈ}}, {{shn|း}}, {{shn|ႉ}}, {{shn|ႊ}}; a sixth tone is unmarked.

[[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] uses the Latin alphabet and its six tones are marked by letters with [[diacritic]]s above or below a certain vowel. Basic notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; margin:1em auto 1em auto"
|+ Tones of Vietnamese
! align="center" | ''Name''
! align="center" | ''Contour''
! align="center" | ''Diacritic''
! align="center" | ''Example''
|-
|ngang
| mid level, {{IPA|˧}}
|not marked
|a
|-
|huyền
| low falling, {{IPA|˨˩}}
|[[grave accent]]
|à
|-
|sắc
| high rising, {{IPA|˧˥}}
|[[acute accent]]
|á
|-
|hỏi
| dipping, {{IPA|˧˩˧}}
|[[hook above]]
|ả
|-
|ngã
| creaky rising, {{IPA|˧ˀ˦˥}}
|[[tilde]]
|ã
|-
|nặng
| creaky falling, {{IPA|˨˩ˀ}}
|[[dot (diacritic)|dot below]]
|ạ
|}

The Latin-based [[Hmong language|Hmong]] and [[Iu Mien language|Iu Mien]] alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the {{IPA|˧}} tone) is left unwritten while the other seven are indicated by the letters ''b, m, d, j, v, s, g'' at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. That system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter keyboard without having to resort to diacritics. In the [[Iu Mien language|Iu Mien]], the letters ''v, c, h, x, z'' indicate tones but unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.

The [[Standard Zhuang]] and [[Zhuang languages]] used to use a unique set of six "tone letters" based on the shapes of numbers, but slightly modified, to depict what tone a syllable was in. This was replaced in 1982 with the use of normal letters in the same manner, like Hmong.

The syllabary of the [[Nuosu language]] depicts tone in a unique manner, having separate glyphs for each tone other than for the mid-rising tone, which is denoted by the addition of a diacritic. Take the difference between ꉬ nge [ŋɯ³³], and ꉫ ngex [ŋɯ³⁴]. In romanisation, the letters t, x, and p are used to demarcate tone. As codas are forbidden in Nuosu there is no ambiguity.