Jan-Olof Svantesson

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Jan-Olof Svantesson, born 1944, is a professor of Linguistics at Lund University, Sweden.

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Svantesson wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1983 on the phonology and morphology of the Kammu language, [1] and has written a book about modern Mongolian phonology and the historical development of Mongolian.

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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mongolian language</span> Official language of Mongolia

Mongolian is the principal language of the Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are native to modern Mongolia and surrounding parts of East and North Asia. Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and a recognized language of Xinjiang and Qinghai.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mongolic languages</span> Language family of Eurasia

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Buryat language</span> Mongolic language of Buryatia (Russia) and neighbouring areas

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Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree in quantity, making 18 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Another notable feature is the pitch accent, a development which it shares with Norwegian. Swedish pronunciation of most consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages.

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Khmu is the language of the Khmu people of the northern Laos region. It is also spoken in adjacent areas of Vietnam, Thailand and China. Khmu lends its name to the Khmuic branch of the Austroasiatic language family, the latter of which also includes Khmer and Vietnamese. Within Austroasiatic, Khmu is often cited as being most closely related to the Palaungic and Khasic languages. The name "Khmu" can also be seen romanized as Kmhmu, Khmu', Kammu, or Khamuk in various publications or alternatively referred to by the name of a local dialect.

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Iau or Turu is a Lakes Plain language of West Papua, Indonesia, spoken by about 2,100 people, native speakers of this language are the Turu people (Iau). Most speakers are monolingual, and their number is growing. Other peoples in the western Lakes Plain area speak basic Iau. Iau is heavily tonal, with 11 tones on nouns and 19 simple and compound tones on verbs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Majang language</span> Eastern Sudanic language of Ethiopia

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Chakhar is a variety of Mongolian spoken in the central region of Inner Mongolia. It is phonologically close to Khalkha and is the basis for the standard pronunciation of Mongolian in Inner Mongolia.

Primarily in Austroasiatic languages, in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or, with a reduced vowel, as in colloquial Khmer, or of the form with no vowel at all, as in Mlabri 'navel' and 'underneath', and Khasi kyndon 'rule', syrwet 'sign', kylla 'transform', symboh 'seed' and tyngkai 'conserve'.

Alasha, or Alaša-Eǰen-e, is a Mongolic variety with features of both Oirat and Mongolian that historically used to belong to Oirat but has come under the influence of Mongolian proper. It has more than 40,000 speakers in Alxa League, Inner Mongolia, China and consists of two sub-dialects, Alasha proper and Eǰene.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swedish orthography</span> Swedish alphabet, spelling, and punctuation rules

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