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The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators and translators.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific; and as many as seventy percent of world languages are tonal. Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese are amongst the most well-known tonal languages used today; however, the languages with the most tones are found in West Africa and the Americas. Most of the tonal marks in languages usually come in the form of diacritics, like the Vietnamese tonal marks, which use five diacritics, including a grave accent (À), an acute accent (Á), a tilde (Ã), a hook above the letter (Ả), and a dot below the vowel (Ạ). Chinese uses four diacritical marks for the four tones of pinyin, signifying the pitch of the syllable. The first tone is a high level tone, the second tone is a rising tone, the third tone is a slight fall followed by a rising tone, and the fourth tone is a falling tone. There is also a neutral tone in Chinese, which signifies that the syllable is pronounced lightly, but the pitch depends chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable.
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.
A pitch-accent language is a language that has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch rather than by loudness, as in a stress-accent language. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully-tonal languages like Standard Chinese in which each syllable can have an independent tone.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
In linguistics, prosody is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct - there is no official spoken standard, although it can be said that Eastern Norwegian Bokmål speech has an unofficial spoken standard, called Urban East Norwegian or Standard East Norwegian, loosely based on the speech of the literate classes of the Oslo area. This variant is the most common one taught to foreign students.
This article describes the phonology of the Somali language.
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone, the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.
In linguistics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Upstep is a much rarer phenomenon than its counterpart, downstep.
Momel is an algorithm developed by Daniel Hirst and Robert Espesser at the CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence: for the analysis and synthesis of intonation patterns.
In linguistics, intonation is variation in spoken pitch when used, not for distinguishing words as sememes, but, rather, for a range of other functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signalling the difference between statements and questions, and between different types of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction.
In linguistics, a prosodic unit, often called an intonation unit or intonational phrase, is a segment of speech that occurs with a single prosodic contour. The abbreviation IU is used and therefore the full form is often found as intonation unit, despite the fact that technically it is a unit of prosody rather than intonation, which is only one element of prosody.
The phonology of second languages is different from the phonology of first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of second languages, such as slower speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.
This article summarizes the phonology of Standard Chinese.
ToBI is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, which was the first ToBI system, developed by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert, among others. Other ToBI systems have been defined for a number of languages; for example, J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese, and an adaptation of ToBI to describe Dutch intonation was developed by Carlos Gussenhoven, and called ToDI. Another variation of ToBI, called IViE, was established in 1998 to enable comparison between several dialects of British English.
Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent and stress placement.
Proto-Slavic accent is closely related to the accentual system of some Baltic languages with whom it shares many common innovations that occurred in the Proto-Balto-Slavic period. Deeper, it inherits from the Proto-Indo-European accent. In modern languages the prototypical accent is reflected in various ways, some preserving the Proto-Slavic situation to a greater degree than others.
The term boundary tone refers to a rise or fall in pitch that occurs in speech at the end of a sentence or other utterance, or, if a sentence is divided into two or more intonational phrases, at the end of each intonational phrase. It can also refer to a low or high intonational tone at the beginning of an utterance or intonational phrase.
References
- Hirst, D.J. & Di Cristo, A. (eds) 1998. Intonation Systems. A survey of Twenty Languages. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). [ ISBN 0-521-39513-5 (Hardback); 052139550X (Paperback)].
- Hirst, D.J. 2004. Lexical and Non-lexical Tone and Prosodic Typology. in Proceedings of International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages. Beijing, March 2004, 81-88
- Hirst, D.J. 2005. Form and function in the representation of speech prosody. in K.Hirose, D.J.Hirst & Y.Sagisaka (eds) Quantitative prosody modeling for natural speech description and generation (=Speech Communication 46 (3-4)), 334-347