In Mandarin Chinese, means mother. Means him. Means horse. And ma. Means scold. Although each word uses the syllable ma, they all translate to different things because of the pitch of the vowel. This is known as tone and it's a feature found in about one third of the world's languages, mostly in Africa, Asia and the Americas. There are various different tonal systems. For instance, Navajo has a simple high low distinction as we can hear in the word. Mandarin on the other hand has a more complex system. It has a high tone. A tone that starts high and falls down low. A tone that rises up to high. And finally, a tone that falls and then rises, known as a contour tone. Mandarin is a good case study because on closer inspection, we can see that there are actually five different tone levels at play. The International phonetic alphabet uses these symbols to represent the five tone levels. In vulgar, you can elect to have tone added to every vowel using the vowel tones option. Note that chaining multiple symbols together is how you create rising, falling and contour tones. Be aware that the vowel tones option works when using custom phonemes and word structure. However, if using the advanced word structure, you'll need to work the tone symbols into the phoneme classes field. Until fairly recently, tone letters were not supported by many fonts. Because of this, linguists have sometimes used other symbols. Most commonly, accent symbols are used. However, accents can't really represent contours, so superscript numbers are another option as you can chain them together. Happy toning!