Tones in the Chinese Language

As is well known, Chinese is a language different from all Western languages and many non-Western languages in that the meaning of word-sounds change depending on the tone with which the word-sound is spoken.

A typical example of tones in the Chinese language is the word-sound ‘ma’.

• Spoken in a flat tone, neither rising nor falling, (the 1st tone), it means ‘mother’ (mā [Traditional Character: 媽/Simplified Character: 妈]).
• Said with a rising tone (the 2nd tone), it means ‘sesame’ or ‘hemp’ (má [麻]).
• Spoken in a falling and then rising tone (the 3rd tone), it means ‘horse’ (mǎ [馬/马]).
• Spoken in a rapidly falling tone (the 4th tone), it means ‘to scold or blame’ (mà [駡/骂]).
• Lastly, spoken with an unstressed (neutral, or 5th) tone at the end of a sentence, it indicates a question (ma [嗎/吗]).

In Chinese the tone is intrinsic to the meaning of the word …thus, a word-sound with a rising tone will have a different meaning than the same word-sound spoken with a falling tone. To the Chinese native-language speaker, the word-sound and the tone are inseparable indicators of meaning.

In fact, in Chinese the definition of ‘word’ includes the written character as well as both the phonetic description of the sound (ie. the pronunciation) and the tone with which it is spoken.

A tea shop in Yúnnán selling Yúnnán’s famous Pu’er tea.

Many foreigners, when first starting to learn the language have difficulty in understanding why Chinese don’t understand them when they misspeak and incorrectly enunciate the tone for the intended meaning of the word spoken.

Actually, Chinese people are remarkably good at intuitively correcting for foreigner’s incorrect use of tones and understanding the intended meaning, as opposed to what the foreigner has actually said …it’s just that beginners often speak so poorly and usually don’t speak in complete sentences, preferring a few words or short phrases instead, so the native-speaker is left with few contextual clues!

Chinese rely on context a lot to interpret meaning, even when conversing with other native-speakers. It is said that Chinese people ‘listen for meaning’, rather than listen just to the words and tones used.

To a Chinese person, if you say ‘mǎ’ with the 3rd tone, it means ‘horse’, …even if you meant to say ‘mother’. Now, do you love your horse (mǎ [馬/马], that is, ma: 3rd tone,) or your mother (mā [媽/妈], that is: ma, 1st tone)? Be careful how you say it …and, if you say it wrong, don’t worry …if there are no horses around, you’ll probably still be understood!

Chinese Tones- A Description

As noted above, the Chinese language contains a set of four tones, plus an additional tone, called the 5th tone by foreigners, and called the ‘neutral’ tone by the Chinese.

A small two-level pagoda in Guìlín, Guǎngxī.

The Chinese themselves refer to tones by number, and they are indicated either by a tone-mark written above the vowel in Pinyin transliterations (shown in brackets, below), or by a number (1 through 5), following the Pinyin character-transliteration where (for whatever reason), tone markings cannot be used, as follows:

First Tone [ – (eg.: mā or ma1)]: A flat tone (neither rising nor falling), spoken in the upper-middle register of the speaker’s vocal range.

Second Tone [ / (eg.: má or ma2)]: A rising tone starting in the lower part of the speaker’s register, and rising to the upper part of the speaker’s voice range.

Third Tone [ \/ (eg.: mǎ or ma3)]: A falling/rising tone, starting in the lower middle range of the speaker’s voice and falling towards the lower range before rising again to the upper range of the speaker’s vocal register. A distinguishing feature of the 3rd tone is that it is of fractionally longer duration than the other tones because of the sliding tone change.

Fourth Tone [ \ (eg.: mà or ma4)]: A falling tone starting in the upper range of the speaker’s voice range and rapidly falling to the lower range of the speaker’s voice.

Neutral (or Fifth) Tone [eg.: ma or ma5] is simply the word-sound spoken in an unstressed manner, without any rising or falling inflection. There is no stroke-mark over vowels for this tone. This is the briefest of all the tones in duration. The neutral tone is used more often in China than in Taiwan. Taiwanese will usually pronounce the normal tone of the second character of two-character words, while Chinese frequently replace the normal tone of the second character with a neutral tone. This is called ‘Tone Sandhi.’ (See the extended discussion of ‘tone sandhi’ at the bottom of this page.)

Having languages containing tones, it would not then be surprising to find that the Chinese are generally highly sensitive to tones as cues to meaning, and they are very acute in their ability to hear (and interpret) tonal inflection in language, even of the briefest sort. And, when the Chinese use tones, they are truly brief: if you are not trained to notice them, you won’t!

So, certainly at the beginning of your Chinese study, you need to train your ear to (unconsciously,) listen for (and evaluate) tones while participating in a conversation. At the beginning it will seem like an impossible task. Don’t worry: all students (eventually) learn how to do it. And you probably won’t notice when you actually begin to do it.

Tones in Other Chinese Languages

As can be seen from the description above, the tones of Chinese are related to a unified voice-range.


Tiān tán, the Altar of Heaven: the temple in Běijīng where Chinese Emperors performed their annual rituals to placate the gods.

Note that all major Chinese languages are toned languages. Chinese contains 4 tones (plus a neutral tone,) but other Chinese languages such as Cantonese and Fujianese (and its cousin Taiwanese), contain 8 tones, Hakka contains 6 tones: other Chinese languages or dialects may have more or fewer tones.

Other Chinese languages, particularly Cantonese and Fujianese, work with different sets of tone ranges. Cantonese and Fujianese, are very different languages. Fujianese belongs to a class of languages called ‘Mǐnnánhuà’ in Chinese, and ‘Hokkien’ or ‘Southern Chinese’ in English. Cantonese has its own class in the classification of Chinese languages.

Both language classes happen to have a total of 8 tones, although their tones are different. In fact, they not only have 8 tones, but, different from Chinese, their tones are not in a unified range, and occupy high, middle and low tone ranges: the tone ranges each contain different rising, falling and/or wavering tones. These languages are likely substantially more difficult from a westerner’s perspective to interpolate audibly with the acuity required.

From a Western perspective, the four tones of Chinese are (initially) hard enough to hear with accuracy …Cantonese and Fujianese may be infernal to the non-native ear!

Learning Tones

The ability to learn language is a natural human capability. If you think about a child’s learning process, they begin by listening …just listening, before they ever begin to speak. And they do a lot of it, before ever trying to say ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, (or in the case of Chinese, ‘māma’ or ‘bàba’). The younger children start learning a new (ie. foreign- or second-) language, the easier it is for them to learn.

In fact, while tones are not as easy for adults to learn, they are learned naturally and without effort by young children, so if you want to give your children the best possible outcome learning Chinese, start them young …the younger the better!

Visitors take a moment to rest while on a walking tour of the Great Wall outside of Běijīng.

This does not mean that adults cannot learn tones, so don’t let the difficulties inhibit you: it just takes a little longer, and requires more practice speaking and listening.

The usual practice when learning tones is for the teacher to first enunciate the tone, then give the student the opportunity to pronounce the tone. This will be done with all four tones numerous times, with the teacher providing corrections as needed.

Certainly the student should pay attention to these lessons, as they are the foundation of the ability to speak Chinese.

The teacher will also spend time developing the student’s acuity in hearing tones, by either saying words and having the student identify the tones of the words, or using recorded conversations to give the student the opportunity to listen to tones used in actual situations.

These basic lessons are very important, and the student should take care to do his or her best in these lessons. But it must be said that the student shouldn’t be overly concerned of he or she has trouble in the beginning identifying the tones, or even if he or she has trouble pronouncing the tones to the satisfaction of the teacher.

The reason is that, assuming that the student has absorbed the basic lessons of tone pronunciation and is in a Chinese-language zone or spends hours in a Chinese class speaking and listening, with time and practice, the student will automatically begin to mimic the proper tones and pronunciation of words, because it is a natural human predisposition to copy the language forms that one hears spoken around one.

Remember the learning process of children …they always get it right!

Unfortunately, if the student learns the basic lessons incorrectly, a habit is built on the incorrect pronunciation, and these habits of speech interfere with the ability to actively listen and model what one hears in one’s own speech, and are extremely hard to break. So try to do it right the first time!

Tonal Changes in Ordinary Language Use: Tone Sandhi

There is an additional complication to Chinese tones, as used in everyday language. Chinese will often modify tones in two-character words by changing the end-tone of the second character from its normal tone (whatever the normal tone is,) to a neutral (or fifth) tone. This regular change of tone-use is called ‘tone sandhi’ and is an aspect of most tonal languages. This particular tone sandhi with end-tones of two character words also happens in Táiwān, but with much less frequency.

There are other universally used tone changes in the Chinese language: where two 3rd tone characters follow each other, the normal practice is to change the tone of the first character to 2nd tone and pronounce the character pair as 2nd tone – 3rd tone, rather than 3rd tone – 3rd tone. This is so because the tone flow is better when saying 2nd tone – 3rd tone together, rather than two third tones together one after another, in ordinary conversation. Where 不 (bù: no, not, negative) is followed by a 4th tone verb, 不 changes to a second tone word (bú). These two ‘tone sandhi’ usages are practiced in both China and Táiwān without exception.

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© R. Teller, 2015