Tones 声调/聲調

pinyin: shēngdiào

Mandarin Chinese has four tones (simplified Chinese: 声调; traditional Chinese: 聲調; pinyin: shēngdiào), namely the first tone (flat or high level tone, 阴平, denoted by ” ¯ ” in Pinyin), the second tone (rising or high-rising tone, 阳平, denoted by ” ˊ ” in Pinyin), the third tone (falling-rising or low tone, 上声, denoted by ” ˇ ” in Pinyin), and the fourth tone (falling or high-falling tone, 去声, denoted by ” ˋ ” in Pinyin).

Natural Comfortable Voice’s Range – Pitch: 5-High, 4-Mid-high, 3-Middle, 2 Mid-low, 1-Low

There is also a fifth tone called neutral (轻声, denoted as no-mark in Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones.

Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has six (often numbered as nine, but three are duplicates). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese.

Tonal languages

Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones.

Here is a minimal tone set from Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, here transcribed by diacritics over the vowels:

  1. A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin ⟨ā⟩)
  2. A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ⟨á⟩)
  3. A low tone with a slight fall (if there is no following syllable, it may start with a dip then rise to a high pitch): /à/ (pinyin ⟨ǎ⟩)
  4. A short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker’s vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ⟨à⟩)
  5. A neutral tone, with no specific contour, used on weak syllables; its pitch depends chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable.

These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription:

mā (妈/媽) ‘mother’
má (麻/麻) ‘hemp’
mǎ (马/馬) ‘horse’
mà (骂/罵) ‘scold’
ma (吗/嗎) (an interrogative particle)

汉语有可能从无声调的变化到出现“四声” (平上去入），根据声母的清浊阴阳分裂成“八调” (阴平、阳平、阴上、阳上、阴去、阳去、阴入、阳入) ，经历了漫长的道路。（学术上声调是从远古汉语音节的几类词尾衍化形成的)

四声是古汉语声调的四种分类以表示音节的变化。现代普通话已经失去了入声。唐宋以来，汉语在四声的基础上区分声母清浊对应的阴调和阳调形成八声，也就是四声八调。

轻声是汉语中所具有的一种特殊变调现象，在各方言和普通话均有出现。轻声一般不被当作声调看待，因为它没有固定的调值（在拼音中表示为无标记）。但也有称第五种音调为中性 ，尽管音调的正式名称为四音。

以下是一些判别轻声字的规则，轻声字用绿色字体注明：

判别条件

单音节虚词(助词)

某些方位词

表趋向的动词

动词和名词的重叠成份

某些词缀，多不带有真正含意

举例

好的、轻轻地、说得好、听著、太棒了、你呢、对吗

墙上、屋里、外面、里边

放下、起来、出去

看看、试试、哥哥、谢谢

桌子、房子、死对头

此外，还有很多尚未确定的规则，以及一些约定俗成的轻声词，在此暂不细究。

汉语现存的各方言，并非皆有八种声调，有的少于八种的，也有多于八种的。究其原因，便是调类分合所致。各方言声调分合不同，导致彼此声调无法一一对应。