This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the melodies of words. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a recording of our liveshow with Dr. Kirby Conrod about language and gender that we held as part of LingFest.

Lauren: Thanks to all the patrons who attended, asked excellent questions, and also helped support us by keeping the show ad-free.

Gretchen: To get access to this bonus episode and many, many other bonus episodes to listen to go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Hey.

Gretchen: Hey.

Lauren: Hey?

Gretchen: Hey!

Lauren: Hey!

Gretchen: So, here’s one word, “hey,” and it’s got a bunch of different vibes depending on what pitch contour we’re using with it.

Lauren: We can use those pitch contours with a whole bunch of different words to give them a different spin. If we have a word like, “ice cream.”

Gretchen: “Ice cream.”

Lauren: Oh, very serious. Uh, “Ice cream?”

Gretchen: That’s a bit of a question. Ice cream…?

Lauren: Ice cream and what?

Gretchen: Ice cream and ice cream!

Lauren: Perfect choice. “Ice cream!”

Gretchen: Very excited ice cream.

Lauren: We’ve said the word “ice cream” with a whole bunch of different intonation that’s given it different meaning. That’s because we’re making use of the way that we can change the melody of words that we’re saying.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about tone, intonation, and the combination of the two. We talk about various meanings of intonation, such as question, list, floor-holding, emphasis, enthusiasm, and sarcasm, and how different languages use different shapes of intonation contours for functions like these. We also talk about things languages do with tones, from changing meanings of individual words to indicating grammatical information like negation. Finally, we talk about the many, many options for writing tone and intonation (from highly technical proposals to fun internet creations), how tone interacts with lyrics/melody in songs, and how “high” versus “low” tone is actually a culturally-specific metaphor – could we start calling tones “thin” and “thick” or “big” and “small” instead?

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language’s canonical pronouns.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Original tumblr post on New Internet Grammar question marks from @pervocracy
• Formal definitions of tone and intonation from the Routledge handbook
• Gender Reveal episode on the social dynamics of pitch and other features with regard to gender
  
• Falling question intonation in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi Creole English
• All Things Linguistic post on transfer features of our intonation into writing
• ‘Tone’ by Moira Yip, for information on prevalence of tone in the worlds languages
• The Four Mandarin Chinese Tones
  
• All Things Linguistic post on understanding tone as a non-tone language speaker
• Hacking Chinese post ‘7 ways to write Mandarin tones’
• Zhao Yuanren/Yuen Ren Chao, such a cool Chinese linguist (he also translated Jabberwocky! and gave his daughter the name Lensey, which contains the only two syllables that are possible in the Chinese language but not actually present in any no Chinese words, thus making her name impossible to write properly in Chinese. Just like, please go read his Wikipedia article.)
• Wikipedia entry for Gwoyeu Romatzyh
• Wikipedia entry for Chinese tongue twisters
• ChinesePod Blog post ‘How to read a Chinese poem with only one sound’
• Wikipedia entry for Vietnamese tone
• ‘Tones in San Juan Quiahije Chatino’ by Emiliana Cruz
  
• ‘High Tone Docking in Sierra Juárez Zapotec’ by Lee Bickmore and George Aaron Broadwell
  
• WALS entry for tone
• ‘The tone system of the Luanyjang dialect of Dinka’ by Bert Remijsen and D. Robert Ladd
  
• ‘Tone and intonation: A case study in two Tibetic languages’ by Teo, A., L. Gawne and M. Baese-Berk
  
• HK Magazine post ‘Ask Mr. Know-It-All: How do you sing in a tonal language like Cantonese?’
• ‘The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical Evidence for Linguistic Relativity’ by S. Dolscheid, S. Shayan, A. Majid, and D. Casasanto
  

Other relevant Lingthusiasm episodes:

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Various vocal fold vibes’
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz’
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles’

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).