What is it about?
The article looks at how languages develope tone - the ability to differentiate between words by changing the pitch alone. The process of developing tones is called 'tonogenesis'. We wanted to see if any generalizations could be made about the contexts that lead to tonogenesis, and in order to do that we collected accounts of how tones developed in 104 language varieties. We divided the triggering contexts into five groups: consonants at the beginning of a syllable, consonants at the end of a syllable, vowels, stress, and a change in the number of syllables, and we look at how these contexts relate to different types of tones developing, as well as how they are distributed accross different areas.
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Why is it important?
Much has been written about this in recent years, and many accounts of tonogenesis in specific languages and langauge families have been published. We wanted to collect all of these accounts together in a format where they could be easily searched and compared.
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This page is a summary of: Tonogenesis, Diachronica, July 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/dia.24022.sae.
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