Assertion: linguist's language | /r/HasProperty | tonal
Facets:
value: mostly
type: DEGREE
value: marginally
type: DEGREE
Source sentences:
text: Many languages of South America are tonal.
text: Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme.
text: That is to say, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighbouring languages are tonal or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question and bring their tones with them.
text: Most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal; notable exceptions are Swahili (in the southeast), most languages spoken in the Senegambia (among them Wolof, Serer and Cangin languages), and Fulani.
text: All languages of the Nilotic language family are tonal.
text: Sino-Tibetan languages (including Burmese, Mog and most varieties of Chinese; though some, such as Shanghainese, are only marginally tonal) and Kra–Dai languages (including Thai and Lao) are mostly tonal.
text: languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Tsat.
text: In some cases it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal.