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1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Moira Yip
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

Among the sounds of languages, consonants and vowels need no explanation to the lay person, but tones are another matter entirely. Tell someone you are writing a book about ‘Tone’, and they look blank, and yet by some estimates as much as 60–70 per cent of the world's languages are tonal. Begin to explain that you are interested in languages that use the pitch of the voice to convey meaning, and more often than not you will be interrupted with a remark such as ‘Oh, that must be really interesting: those emotions and nuances and subtleties are so important when we're speaking!’ Politely explain that actually you are interested in languages that use pitch to distinguish one word from another, not just to convey subtleties, and most people will assume that such languages are rare, and probably spoken only by isolated communities in less developed countries – until you point out that Mandarin Chinese (885,000,000 speakers), Yoruba (20,000,000) and Swedish (9,000,000) are all tonal.

Perhaps because of these misapprehensions (particularly prevalent in Western cultures), even among linguists tone is sometimes seen as a specialized topic that the general linguist can largely ignore. Undergraduate courses often pay it only cursory attention, and even graduate courses may devote no more than a class or two to the topic. The goal of this book is to fill that gap. It assumes a basic knowledge of phonological theory, but no prior acquaintance with the phonology of tone.

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Tone , pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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  • Introduction
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.006
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  • Introduction
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Moira Yip, University College London
  • Book: Tone
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164559.006
Available formats
×