"tonal" Languages" ?

[swissie]

Next to Thai, what other "tonal languages" are there? (Worldwide).

I gather, that for example, some chinese dialects are just as "tonal" as Thai. How about the lingo in and around Shanghai?

Thanks & cheers.

[bytebuster]

Wikipedia contains an article with a full-featured two-pages list of such languages or even languages that use certain aspects of tonality.

If you need more than that, you would better ask on specific forums for Linguists as most members here are primarily focussed on Thai.

Edited October 5, 2012 by bytebuster

[cooked]

Good question though.

[AyG]

Pretty well all Chinese languages are tonal, as are Vietnamese and Lao (which, of course, is very closely related to Thai).

These languages, however, differ in the type and number of tones. For example, Vietnamese has a half-rising tone (starts low and rises to midrange) which Thai doesn't have.

Other languages in East & South East Asia are not tonal, including Bahasa Malaysia, Khmer, Burmese, Japanese & Korean.

[Richard W]

Other languages in East & South East Asia are not tonal, including Bahasa Malaysia, Khmer, Burmese, Japanese & Korean.

Burmese is borderline tonal - some count its vocalic phonation types as constituting tone.

Khmer is reportedly becoming a tone language - Cr clusters are losing the /r/ and being replaced by a tone instead.

Japanese has the vaguely tonal feature of terracing. It operates across syllables, unlike the monosyllabic tone we are used to.

Vocalic register features, common in Mon-Khmer languages and shared by Cham (related to Malay), can end up being close to tonal, and some Thai Mon-Khmer languages have complex register systems. If written, these registers may be shown using Thai tone marks. For some of these languages, whether they are register languages or tonal languages is a matter of opinion rather than fact.

[CaptHaddock]

Does anyone speak Cantonese? I understand that it has 12 or 13 tones (depending on whose counting). Considering the difficulty of the 5 Thai tones for a native English speaker, the mind fairly boggles. Does anyone know if Cantonese holds the record for the most tones?

Edited October 7, 2012 by CaptHaddock

[bytebuster]

Does anyone know if Cantonese holds the record for the most tones?

There are six, but indeed, they seem hard to grasp quickly:

[Johpa]

English uses tones, it just does not use them for phonemic purposes, that is related to meaning.

You are going to Thailand.

You are going to Thailand?

Most people will change the tone on the word 'Thailand" between the declarative statement and the interrogative statement but the meaning of the word "Thailand' remains constant. In a manner, English uses tones similarly to how Thai uses particles.

[Richard W]

I understand that it has 12 or 13 tones (depending on whose counting). ... Does anyone know if Cantonese holds the record for the most tones?

As Bytebuster explained, that reduces to 6 by the normal counting scheme. Kam has 9 tones in live syllables and 6 in dead syllables - these could be counted as 15 using the Chinese rules, but the 6 dead tones can be satisfactorily identified with live tones, reducing the count to 9. I don't know if Kam holds the record for the number of tones.

[CaptHaddock]

Wikipedia contains an article with a full-featured two-pages list of such languages or even languages that use certain aspects of tonality.

If you need more than that, you would better ask on specific forums for Linguists as most members here are primarily focussed on Thai.

Very interesting article, especially the account of how Oklahoman Cherokee developed tones after its 1838 split from North Carolina Cherokee in a linguistic experiment carried out under the auspices of the US government.