In linguistics, intonation refers to changes in pitch that help express a speaker's feelings, emphasize certain parts of speech, show the purpose of a sentence, or control how a conversation flows. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is understood as a yes-or-no question when spoken with a single rising pitch, but it is understood as asking between two options when "Spanish" is said with a rising pitch and "French" with a falling pitch. While intonation mainly involves pitch changes, it often works together with other speech elements, such as loudness or rhythm. Intonation is different from tone, which is when pitch is used to differentiate words, as in Mandarin, or to show grammar rules, as in Kinyarwanda.

Transcription

Most rules for writing sounds are created to describe one specific accent or language. These rules must be explained based on what is being described. However, for general use, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides two intonation marks shown in the box at the beginning of this article. Global rising and falling intonation are shown with a line that goes up from left to right [↗ ︎] and a line that goes down from left to right [↘ ︎], respectively. These marks can be written directly next to a syllable or separated with a space if they apply to a larger part of the sentence.

In this example, the rising pitch on "street" shows that the question focuses on that word, specifically on where he found it, not whether he found it.

In this case, as is common with "wh-" questions, there is a rising tone on the question word and a falling tone at the end of the question.

In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are identified:

It is also common to draw a line above, next to, or through a phrase to show its pitch. This method is not supported by Unicode as of 2015, but the symbols have been proposed. The following example requires a special font, such as Gentium Plus, either as the default browser font or as a user-defined font for IPA text, as described in Template:IPA#Usage.

Functions

All languages that use spoken words rely on pitch in intonation to express meaning. Intonation helps with tasks such as showing emphasis, expressing surprise or irony, or asking a question. Tonal languages, like Chinese and Hausa, use both intonation and pitch to help distinguish between different words. Many authors have tried to create lists of how intonation is used. One person, W.R. Lee, suggested ten uses. J.C. Wells and E. Couper-Kuhlen each listed six uses. Wells's list is shown below; the examples are not from him.

It is unclear if these lists would work for other languages without changes.

English

The way English intonation is described has changed over time in the United States and the United Kingdom. Different dialects in both countries may also use different intonation patterns.

Descriptions of English intonation in the UK began in the 16th century. In the early 20th century, the main method for describing English and French intonation focused on a few basic "tunes" linked to intonation units. For example, Tune 1 had a final drop in pitch, while Tune 2 had a final rise. Language experts like H. E. Palmer studied how these units worked, identifying the nucleus as the most important part of an intonation unit. The nucleus usually matches the main stressed syllable in the last word of the unit. Each nucleus carries one of several pitch patterns, such as fall, rise, fall-rise, or rise-fall. Before the nucleus, there may be a head with stressed syllables and a tail with following syllables. Unstressed syllables before the head or nucleus form a pre-head. This method was later expanded by Halliday and O'Connor and Arnold, though their terms varied. The "Standard British" approach to intonation is explained in detail by Wells and in a simpler form by Roach. Halliday identified three main factors in intonation: Tonality (how speech is divided into units), Tonicity (where the stressed syllable is placed), and Tone (the choice of pitch pattern). These terms, called "the three T's," are still used today.

Research by Crystal highlighted the importance of studying intonation in real, unscripted speech. He also noted the role of features like speech speed, pitch range, loudness, and rhythm in communication, which were often linked to intonation.

In these methods, intonation is written directly into the text. For example, the | symbol shows where one intonation unit ends and another begins.

A major development in UK intonation studies was Discourse Intonation, introduced by David Brazil. This approach focuses on how intonation helps communicate new or shared information, shows the relationship between speakers (like teacher-student), and helps manage conversation turns. This method was influenced by Halliday. It mainly studies pitch changes and "key" without focusing on other speech features like rhythm or loudness.

From the 1940s to the 1990s, the main framework for American English intonation was based on pitch phonemes, or tonemes. Trager and Smith identified four pitch levels: low (1), middle (2), high (3), and very high (4). Kenneth Pike used the opposite labels: high (1) and low (4). Their system became complex, with each pitch phoneme having four variations and a Terminal Contour to end an intonation unit. They also studied four stress patterns. Dwight Bolinger argued that pitch patterns, not just individual pitch levels, were more important for studying intonation.

Two main pitch patterns in sentences are rising-falling and rising. Other rises and falls depend on where stress is placed in words.

For declarative sentences or wh-questions ending with a drop in pitch, the drop happens either after the last stressed syllable or on the last syllable itself if it is stressed. For yes–no questions ending with a rise, the pitch rises to the last stressed syllable and stays high throughout the sentence.

A newer method for analyzing intonation came from Janet Pierrehumbert and is called ToBI (short for "Tones and Break Indices"). This system is sometimes called autosegmental. Key features include identifying pitch changes and where speech breaks occur. A simple example shows the phrase "we looked at the sky" with a rise on "sky" and "and saw the clouds" with a fall on "clouds."

The ToBI system is simpler than earlier methods and has been widely used to study intonation in many languages.

French

French intonation is very different from English intonation. There are four main patterns of intonation in French.

The most noticeable feature of French intonation is the continuation pattern. In many languages, such as English and Spanish, stress is placed on a particular syllable in each word, and some speakers use a rising tone with that stress. However, French does not use stress or special intonation on any syllable. Instead, in every "rhythm group" except the last one in a sentence, the final syllable has a rising pitch. For example (the pitch change symbols ↘ and ↗ show the syllable immediately after the symbol):

Adjectives are part of the same rhythm group as their noun. Each item in a list forms its own rhythm group:

Side comments added in the middle of a sentence form their own rhythm group:

As shown in the example sentences, a sharp drop in pitch occurs on the last syllable of a declarative statement. The syllables before the final syllable in the last rhythm group are at a high pitch.

In informal speech, yes/no questions are often shown by a sharp rise in pitch, without changing or rearranging words. For example:

A common form in both spoken and written French is the "Est-ce que … ("Is it that …")" structure. In this form, the spoken question can end with either a rising or falling pitch:

The most formal way to ask a yes/no question, used in both spoken and written French, switches the order of the subject and verb. In this form, the spoken question can also end with either a rising or falling pitch:

Sometimes yes/no questions begin with a topic phrase that explains the focus of the sentence. In these cases, the topic phrase follows the intonation pattern of a declarative sentence, while the rest of the question follows the usual yes/no pattern:

Information questions begin with a question word such as qui (who), pourquoi (why), combien (how many), etc., which are called interrogatives in linguistics. In French, the question word may be followed by "est-ce que" (like "where is it that …"), "est-ce qui," or by switching the subject and verb order (like "where does he go?"). The sentence starts at a high pitch, which drops quickly after the question word or its first syllable if the word has multiple syllables. There may be a slight rise in pitch on the final syllable of the question. For example:

In both cases, the question begins and ends at higher pitches than a declarative sentence.

In informal speech, the question word is sometimes placed at the end of the sentence. In this case, the question ends at a high pitch, often with a slight rise on the final syllable. The question may also begin at a slightly higher pitch.

Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a language where the pitch of sounds changes the meaning of words. When sounds in a word are said with different high or low pitches, they can mean different things, even if the same letters are used. However, Mandarin also uses overall pitch patterns to show the type of sentence being spoken.

There are four main types of sentences with different pitch patterns: declarative sentences (statements), unmarked questions (questions that do not use special words), yes–no questions (questions that use the word "ma" at the end), and A-not-A questions (questions like "He go not go," which ask if something is true or not). In the Beijing dialect, these sentence types are usually told apart by how pitch changes, using a scale from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest):

In general, questions start with a higher pitch than statements. The pitch rises and then falls in all sentences. For yes–no questions and unmarked questions, the pitch rises at the end of the sentence. For statements and A-not-A questions, the pitch ends very low.

Because Mandarin uses tones within each syllable to change word meanings, these tones create small changes in pitch around the overall sentence patterns. This means the overall pitch pattern acts like a range, and the tones inside the words move up and down within that range.

Additionally, the way pitch changes in Mandarin sentences is influenced by several things, such as the tone of the last syllable in the sentence, whether the last word is focused (important), and the speaker's dialect.

Punjabi

Intonation in Punjabi has been studied by many researchers over time. Studies by Gill and Gleason (1969), Malik (1995), Kalra (1982), Bhatia (1993), and Joshi (1972 & 1989) describe how intonation works in Punjabi, based on their theories and models.

Chander Shekhar Singh described how Punjabi intonation is used in sentences spoken alone. His research focused on two levels of intonation: horizontal and vertical. In the first experiment, he studied three types of sentences: declarative (statements), imperative (commands), and interrogative (questions). In the second experiment, he compared the intonation of these sentences vertically, meaning he looked at how their pitch patterns changed while keeping the main pitch pattern the same.

The experiments found important results. At the vertical level, four different ways of emphasizing parts of sentences were identified in Punjabi.

The second experiment showed a clear difference between the horizontal and vertical levels of intonation.

Comparative studies

Cruttenden explains that it is very difficult to compare intonation systems across different languages. This difficulty is made harder because there is no widely accepted system for describing these systems.

Falling intonation is used at the end of questions in some languages, such as Hawaiian, Fijian, Samoan, and Greenlandic. It is also used in Hawaiian Creole English, which likely developed from Hawaiian. Rising intonation is common on statements spoken in urban Belfast. Falling intonation is often used on questions in urban Leeds speech.

A project funded by the ESRC (E. Grabe, B. Post, and F. Nolan) studied the intonation of nine urban accents of British English across five speaking styles. This research created the IViE Corpus and a special transcription system. These resources can be downloaded from the project’s website. A follow-up paper shows that dialects of British and Irish English differ significantly.

A project aimed at collecting descriptions of intonation in twenty languages, using a unified system called INTSINT, led to a book published in 1998 by D. Hirst and A. Di Cristo. The book includes descriptions of languages such as American English, British English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Moroccan Arabic, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Beijing Chinese. Some contributors used their own systems instead of INTSINT.

Disorders

People who have congenital amusia have difficulty telling the difference, recognizing, and copying the tone of the last words in sentences.