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The British Council Teaching English site says:

English is not a tonal language – i.e. pitch changes in words do not change meanings. Patterns of pitch changes (intonation patterns) are [instead] used in English to indicate attitude.

However, we know the same expression "Sorry" may mean different things when used with a different pitch or tone, for instance:

  1. Please repeat (Sorry! with high pitch at end)
  2. Excuse me (Sorry, with normal pitch)

So, why does the above body consider English not to be a tonal language? Or am I in some way misunderstanding (as a non-native English speaker) the precise meaning of the term 'tonal language'?

Laurel
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Sazzad Hissain Khan
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    See Is there a name for words which are pronounced differently depending on which definition is in play?, where no examples were offered before today (homographs are obviously a different matter, and intercategorial polysemes {like 'house' [n] and 'house' [v]} are often also considered as being separate words). – Edwin Ashworth Nov 07 '23 at 11:46
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    I'd say that there is the odd example and that the BC edict is not totally binding. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 07 '23 at 11:55
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    Those two uses of "sorry" aren't really very different meanings. They're different senses of the same meaning of apology. The first apologizes for not hearing and making the speaker repeat themselves, the second apologizes for bumping into someone. – Barmar Nov 07 '23 at 15:39
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    Some things are just not disputable. English is not a tonal language. Chinese and Vietnamese are. – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 15:43
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    Another example: The White House (in Washington D.C.) and a greenhouse (where one grows plants) have falling pitch, whereas a white house and a green house (houses that are white and green) are very likely to have constant pitch. This also doesn't mean that English is a tonal language. – Peter Shor Nov 07 '23 at 16:23
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    English uses tone for paralinguistics, as do many other languages. – Crazymoomin Nov 07 '23 at 16:56
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    This reminds me of a scene from ''Star Trek Enterprise'' where the linguist Sato is trying to learn a new language from an alien teacher. At one point she says "Can you say that again slower?" He says "If I say it slower, it means something else." – Shawn V. Wilson Nov 07 '23 at 17:09
  • There seems a lot of dispute about what are and aren't tonal languages as commonly understood (e.g. Danish, some German dialects, Gaelic, Scots, Slovene, and it's not unheard of for some dialects to be tonal and others not). But I've not seen anyone propose English to be tonal. The Wikipedia article on tone is thorough but sometimes technical. – Stuart F Nov 07 '23 at 17:16
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    Don't confuse pitch and stress, tonic or otherwise. – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 17:36
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    "Rising pitch at the end" is indicated with a question mark (?), not an exclamation point (!), as "rising pitch at the end" is how English speakers indicate questions in speech. (In other words, "Sorry?" does not mean "Please repeat", it means "Sorry, could you say that again?") – No Name Nov 07 '23 at 20:13
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    You gave used a one-word sentence as an example of how one word changes connotation with tone. But it's the sentence's tone that has changed the underlying meaning. – Yosef Baskin Nov 07 '23 at 22:55
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    There is one minimal pair I can think of -- "record" the noun, vs. "record" the verb. The sound frequency of the speaker's voice is higher for the first syllable of the noun, and the second syllable of the verb. Not sure whether this is best described as "pitch", "stress", "intonation", or something else. – Eiríkr Útlendi Nov 08 '23 at 00:05
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    @EiríkrÚtlendi this is usually seen as a secondary feature of the stress accent of English. Stress accents almost always come with secondary pitch changes (and pitch accents also almost always come with secondary stress changes). The only reason to call English's accent a pitch accent would be if the pitch is more reliably used as an indicator of accent location than stress (and to a greater extent than other languages typically said to have stress accents) – Tristan Nov 08 '23 at 14:46
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    there are a great many minimal pairs for accent location in English, mostly consisting of bisyllabic noun/verb pairs borrowed from Romance with a noun with initial accent and a verb with final accent – Tristan Nov 08 '23 at 14:48
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    The claim is true that English is non-tonal. The claim is false that tone doesn't change meaning; it affects the meaning of the sentence. – Kaz Nov 09 '23 at 18:24

5 Answers5

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Sorry is still the word sorry no matter your intonation, though it may have different meanings in context. In a tonal language, say Mandarin Chinese, it would be an entirely different written form that the intonation represented.

jia(1) = home 家

jia(3) = fake 假

jia(4) = drive 驾

These would not be under the same listing in a dictionary and are not etymologically related to one another.

DW256
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    May be worth adding that this is a demonstration that Mandarin has lexical tone, while English does not. I.e. in Mandarin but not in English tone is widely used to distinguish between distinct words or lexemes. – bdsl Nov 07 '23 at 14:49
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    Not only an entirely different written form, but, importantly, an entirely different word with an entirely different meaning, which your last sentence does make clear, but I would edit the earlier statement to make it explicit. – David Conrad Nov 07 '23 at 21:36
  • I don't think I will ever understand how a Chinese person can look up an unknown word in a dictionary. You just heard someone say "jia", and now what? – vgru Nov 15 '23 at 17:41
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    @vgru It's all about context. Fortunately there's usually an accompanying character or two that helps to disambiguate, but even then the question of which character someone is referring to frequently comes up. Lots of puns. – DW256 Nov 16 '23 at 01:09
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    @vgru You look through the characters that can be pronounced jia in the tone you heard, until you find one whose meaning fits. It’s not so very different from how English works: you hear a word you don’t know, then you look up a few dozen different possible ways that word might be represented orthographically before you hit upon the correct spelling and find the word you’re looking for. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 04 '23 at 21:30
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You seem to be confusing intonation with tonality. English definitely has intonation (pretty much all natural languages do), but it is not a tonal language.

Tonal languages use tonality for either inflection or for differentiating between individual words which would otherwise be homophones.

In the first case, changing the tone of a noun may change it from being a definite noun to an indefinite noun, or from singular to plural, or even in theory change its grammatical gender. Similarly, changing the tone of a verb may change its tense or switch it from being first-person to third-person.

In the second case, changing the tone completely changes the word. Mandarin Chinese (and most other Sinitic languages) is like this. Using ‘ma’ as an example, there are five possible tones in Mandarin Chinese (mā, má, mǎ, mà, and ma); each one of them corresponds to a different word (that has its own character and dictionary entry), and getting the tone wrong completely changes the meaning of the word itself (for example ‘mǎ’ is ‘horse’, while ‘mā’ is ‘mom’).

Intonation, on the other hand, is about things that are not part of the words themselves. In English, a lot of what punctuation conveys in the written language (other than pauses indicated by things like commas) is conveyed using intonation in the spoken language. For example ‘The witch is dead.’, ‘The witch is dead!’, ‘The witch is dead?’, and ‘The witch is dead...’ would all have different intonation in spoken English. The overall meaning of the sentence shifts a bit in each case, but none of the individual words change their meaning even if their intonation changes.

Intonation in English also coveys things that would require extra words to convey in the written language. Using the above example, ‘The witch is dead!’ could be an expression of jubilation over the demise of the witch, or it may be an expression of disbelief that the witch was defeated, or it may even be indicative of fury at the fact that the witch died. In the spoken language, those cases can be differentiated by the intonation of the sentence together with other things like rate of speech, lengthening of vowels, and overall volume. But just like with the earlier examples of intonation, none of the words changes in meaning just because of the differences.

Austin Hemmelgarn
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    Also, each word of The witch is dead. can be stressed which then changes the meaning but not the pronunciation of those words. – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 20:21
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    Not at all pleased with this answer. Mainly because I was two thirds of the way through writing pretty much exactly this. +1 – Araucaria - Him Nov 07 '23 at 22:16
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    I'd just add that intonation also tells us about the grammatical structure of English sentences and also, even when it doesn't, can change the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence entirely. It is expressly not merely an indicator of attitudes and so forth. – Araucaria - Him Nov 07 '23 at 22:19
  • "or lexical differentiation" I think this phrasing is a little confusing, as it implies a generative process which is not how Mandarin tone works. – Azor Ahai -him- Nov 09 '23 at 02:59
  • @AzorAhai-him- Point taken. I’ve edited the answer to hopefully make what I meant clearer. – Austin Hemmelgarn Nov 09 '23 at 12:13
  • I'm still not sure that's accurate, would we say that stops in English are used for distinguishing between words that would otherwise be homophones? – Azor Ahai -him- Nov 09 '23 at 23:09
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    @AzorAhai-him- If the point of comparison is a language that does not differentiate between, for example, voiced and voiceless stops (or doesn’t even have voiced stops), then yes, I would in fact say that that’s an accurate statement. My goal here isn’t to be perfectly accurate, it’s to explain the general concepts to people who are not linguists, and I would argue that the way I’m describing things is a useful abstraction for that purpose even if it’s not ‘accurate’ (much like the Bohr model of the atom is not ‘accurate’, but still a pedagogically useful abstraction). – Austin Hemmelgarn Nov 10 '23 at 02:43
  • if you like. – Azor Ahai -him- Nov 10 '23 at 04:27
  • Another way to say this might be that it changes the connotation but not the denotation – PC Luddite Nov 10 '23 at 06:07
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    @AzorAhai-him- Can you explain what you mean by “a generative process which is not how Mandarin works”? I don’t perceive anything confusing about the statement that tonal languages use tonemes (or tonal differences) for lexical differentiation. For exactitude, perhaps lexical definition would be better, since even tonal languages often have words where the tone does not actually differentiate anything (e.g., Mandarin 给 gěi or 忒 tēi, which have inherent but non-contrasting tone, since these syllables do not exist with any other tones), but ‘differentiation’ seems adequate enough to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 10 '23 at 11:31
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English is a semi-tonal or, more commonly, a pitch-accent language. The reasons you state are exactly why this category exists. Our tones don't literally change words like in Chinese, but can influence meaning.

Michael W.
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    Which is basically what the quote means when it says it indicates attitude. – Barmar Nov 07 '23 at 15:40
  • @Barmar It can have truth-conditional meaning, not only attitudinal meaning. – Araucaria - Him Nov 07 '23 at 17:16
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    Perhaps you should enhance your answer with examples. And how would this work in written English? – Barmar Nov 07 '23 at 17:19
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    What tones? We have intonation, pitch and stress. No tones except tones of voice. [ha ha] – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 17:37
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    English is not a pitch-accent language (except, apparently, a few dialects like Hong Kong English, according to Wikipedia). It's a stress-accent language. Pitch-accent doesn't mean "uses pitch in any way at all," it means "uses pitch instead of loudness/length as the primary feature to express syllabic stress." – A_S00 Nov 07 '23 at 20:07
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    @Lambie I'm not sure I like your tone. – Mitch Nov 07 '23 at 20:16
  • @Mitch Yep, very funny as always. – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 20:20
  • Is there any language where you don't use the tone of your voice to express different emotions while saying the same thing ? (Like the "sorry" exemple in OP questions) I feel like this is a pretty baseline stuff and wouldn't need a category for it. – Jemox Nov 08 '23 at 09:11
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    @A_S00: That's an interesting claim Wikipedia makes here (without reference). The perspective may have changed recently, but at least for the time span between 1980 and 2010, many phonologists working on English prosody would tend to disagree (I'm thinking of researchers like Pierrehumbert, Gussenhoven, and Shattuck-Huffnagel who all describe English intonation in terms of pitch accents). – Schmuddi Nov 08 '23 at 10:31
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    @Schmuddi I haven't read those works yet, but it's pretty clear that pitch in English is not analogous to the more canonical examples of pitch accent languages (e.g. things like Japanese, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, much of Mainland Scandinavian etc) because it it doesn't operate at the word level (except to the extent that stress accents cross-linguistically almost always include pitch changes, and so if you squint could be analysed as pitch accents with secondary stress changes instead) – Tristan Nov 08 '23 at 14:44
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    @Schmuddi FWIW Wikipedia says that "pitch accent" can be used in the lexical sense (e.g. in which Japanese and Swedish would have pitch accent) or in an intonational sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent_(intonation))—but, as far as I can tell, these are different usages of the term. – Joshua Grosso Nov 10 '23 at 02:34
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    Personally, I think it's more likely that the OP was talking about lexical pitch accent (but I can't say that for sure, of course). – Joshua Grosso Nov 10 '23 at 02:35
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"Sorry!" in that example is the entire sentence and English, like many other non-tonal language, does have sentence-level tones. Another example is questions have a rising pitch.

There are a handful heteronyms in English, but some have non-tonal pronunciation differences (like "bass") and those that are purely tonal (like "affect" or "object") are polysemic.

Contrast that with a tonal language like Swedish which has tons of examples like "anden" ("the duck") and "anden" ("the genie" or "the ghost"), "akter", "banen", "brunnen" and many others where the only phonetic difference is the tones and the semantic content and etymology is different.

Sandra
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  • Re "anden" ... and "anden": Interesting. Not so in Danish and Norwegian: "anden" and "ånden" – Peter Mortensen Nov 10 '23 at 00:19
  • Words like affect and object are not differentiated by tone in English, but by stress. Stress and tone are not the same. @Peter Ande also exists in Norwegian in the sense ‘spirit’, and the pair works the same as in Swedish: anden ‘the duck’ has accent 1 (acute); anden ‘the spirit’ has accent 2 (grave). There is, by coincidence, an identical minimal pair in Danish, though with different words: anden ‘the duck’ (with stød) and anden ‘other, second’ (without stød) – stød being largely parallel to, and having the same origin as, accent 1/acute in Swedish and Norwegian. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 04 '23 at 21:25
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Let's dissect what British Council Teaching English site says, first:

English is not a tonal language.

This is a true statement. Why it's true? Because in English:

pitch changes in words do not change meanings.

And because one characteristic of tone languages (or tonal languages) is that the dictionary meaning of words (including single syllable words) changes with pitch.

Now, let's look at your concern:

However, we know the same expression "Sorry" may mean different things when used with a different pitch or tone, for instance:

  1. Please repeat (Sorry! with high pitch at end)
  2. Excuse me (Sorry, with normal pitch)

I understand that this phenomenon in English may be a common cause for the confusion over the difference between "intonation" and "tone" (I was confused before too). What your example is actually about is an application of intonation NOT tone. Why? Because: the dictionary meaning of the the English word "Sorry" doesn't change even the intonation (or the changes in pitch) is applied to it in the way you described above. So what you're concerning is not conflicting with what's on the site.

Moreover, both intonation and tone (and even stress) work on the same basis, the variation of pitch. It means the speaker varies the pitch of a syllable (or syllables) in a word (or a combination of words in a sentence) to create the desired effect. The difference is while tone languages, the effect of pitch variation does change the dictionary meaning of words (including words with just one single syllable), non-tonal languages does not. What English speakers can do though is to apply variation of pitch to add more additional nuances to the clause or sentence (like to express their emotion or feeling or their attitude toward some situation, etc.), like one in your example above. Regardless of this, the dictionary meanings of the words in the sentence or clause remain the same.

Bonus, pitch and frequency, are loosely speaking, more or less the same, strictly speaking they're quite different. Pitch describes the perception of the listener while frequency changes while frequency is a physical (acoustic) measurement for sound (waves). The study of frequency related to acoustic phonetics and is more complicated to further explain.

Tran Khanh
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  • Resource and resource still have a semantic and etymologic relationship. – Sandra Nov 11 '23 at 13:15
  • @Sandra but their meanings are still not the same right, say, if you mistook one instead of other it could confuse listeners. – Tran Khanh Nov 11 '23 at 13:39
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    That's typical for polysemy. – Sandra Nov 11 '23 at 20:51
  • @Sandra, Oxford dictionary lists the two words in different entries, Merriam Webster groups them on one page (but still two different entries). However, since stress is also created by variation in pitch (amongst other things), to avoid the controversy of that statement, I've decided to remove it and added some more details. – Tran Khanh Nov 12 '23 at 03:39
  • Yes, they are separate lexemes but they have a polysemic relationship which disqualifies them as examples of language tonality. – Sandra Nov 13 '23 at 07:58