text:
Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.

Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others.

Mechanics
Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics, but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects.

Below is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics:
 * {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! rowspan="2" | Tone name ! rowspan="2" | Tone ID ! rowspan="2" | Vni/telex/Viqr ! rowspan="2" | Description ! colspan="2" | Chao Tone Contour ! rowspan="2" | Diacritic ! rowspan="2" | Example ! Northern ! Southern
 * ngang "flat"
 * A1
 * [default]
 * mid level
 * colspan="2" | (33) or  (44)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ◌
 * ma
 * huyền "deep"
 * A2
 * 2 / f / `
 * low falling (breathy)
 * colspan="2" | (31) or  (21)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ◌̀
 * mà
 * sắc "sharp"
 * B1
 * 1 / s / '
 * mid rising, tense
 * colspan="2" | (35) or  (45)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ◌́
 * má
 * nặng "heavy"
 * B2
 * 5 / j /.
 * mid falling, glottalized, heavy
 * (3ˀ2ʔ) or (3ˀ1ʔ)
 * (12) or (212)
 * style="text-align: center;" |़
 * mạ
 * hỏi "asking"
 * C1
 * 3 / r / ?
 * mid falling(-rising), emphasis
 * (313) or (323) or  (31)
 * rowspan="2" | (324) or  (214)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ◌̉
 * mả
 * ngã "tumbling"
 * C2
 * 4 / x / ~
 * mid rising, glottalized
 * (3ˀ5) or (4ˀ5)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ̃|◌̃
 * mã
 * }
 * 4 / x / ~
 * mid rising, glottalized
 * (3ˀ5) or (4ˀ5)
 * style="text-align: center;" | ̃|◌̃
 * mã
 * }

Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels:
 * 1) A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin $⟨ā⟩$)
 * 2) A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin $⟨á⟩$)
 * 3) A low tone with a slight fall (if there is no following syllable, it may start with a dip then rise to a high pitch): /à/ (pinyin $⟨ǎ⟩$)
 * 4) A short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin $⟨à⟩$)
 * 5) A neutral tone, with no specific contour, used on weak syllables; its pitch depends chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable.

These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription:
 * 1) mā (/) 'mother'
 * 2) má (/) 'hemp'
 * 3) mǎ (/) 'horse'
 * 4) mà (/) 'scold'
 * 5) ma (/) (an interrogative particle)

These may be combined into a tongue-twister:

 * Simplified: 妈妈骂马的麻吗?
 * Traditional: 媽媽罵馬的麻嗎?
 * Pinyin: Māma mà mǎde má ma?
 * IPA
 * Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?'

See also One-syllable article.

A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is:

 * ไหมใหม่ไหม้มั้ย.
 * IPA:
 * Translation: 'Does new silk burn?'

A Vietnamese tongue twister:
 * Bấy nay bây bầy bảy bẫy bậy.
 * IPA:
 * Translation: 'Recently, you've been setting up the seven traps incorrectly.'

A Cantonese tongue twister:
 * 一人因一日引一刃一印而忍
 * Jyutping: jat1 jan4 jan1 jat1 jat6 jan5 jat1 jan6 jat1 jan3 ji4 jan2
 * IPA:
 * Translation: 'One person endures a day with one knife and one print.'

Tone is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian. It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which is the case in Punjabi.

Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.

Phonation
In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese, for example, the ngã and sắc tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the nặng and huyền tones are both low-falling, but the nặng tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the huyền tone is longer and often has breathy voice. In some languages, such as Burmese, pitch and phonation are so closely intertwined that the two are combined in a single phonological system, where neither can be considered without the other. The distinctions of such systems are termed registers. The tone register here should not be confused with register tone described in the next section.

Phonation type
Gordon and Ladefoged established a continuum of phonation, where several types can be identified.

Relationship with tone
Kuang identified two types of phonation: pitch-dependent and pitch-independent. Contrast of tones has long been thought of as differences in pitch height. However, several studies pointed out that tone is actually multidimensional. Contour, duration, and phonation may all contribute to the differentiation of tones. Investigations from the 2010s using perceptual experiments seem to suggest phonation counts as a perceptual cue.

Tone and pitch accent
Many languages use tone in a more limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent and whether a coherent definition is even possible.

Tone and intonation
Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as well as sometimes by changes in phonation. Lexical tone coexists with intonation, with the lexical changes of pitch like waves superimposed on larger swells. For example, Luksaneeyanawin (1993) describes three intonational patterns in Thai: falling (with semantics of "finality, closedness, and definiteness"), rising ("non-finality, openness and non-definiteness") and "convoluted" (contrariness, conflict and emphasis). The phonetic realization of these intonational patterns superimposed on the five lexical tones of Thai (in citation form) are as follows:

With convoluted intonation, it appears that high and falling tone conflate, while the low tone with convoluted intonation has the same contour as rising tone with rising intonation.

Tonal polarity
Languages with simple tone systems or pitch accent may have one or two syllables specified for tone, with the rest of the word taking a default tone. Such languages differ in which tone is marked and which is the default. In Navajo, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, whereas marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani, however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone. There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables.

Register tones and contour tones
In many Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a single tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.

In the most widely spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their distinctive shape, known as contour, with each tone having a different internal pattern of rising and falling pitch. Many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone. Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance (such as changing a verb to a noun or vice versa).

Most tonal languages have a combination of register and contour tones. Tone is typical of languages including Kra–Dai, Vietic, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, such as Cantonese, which produces three varieties of contour tone at three different pitch levels, and the Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench, which employs five level tones and one or two rising tones across levels.

Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone (usually in long vowels). In such systems there is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine relative-pitch and contour tones, such as many Kru languages and other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa.

Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi, for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones.

Word tones and syllable tones
Another difference between tonal languages is whether the tones apply independently to each syllable or to the word as a whole. In Cantonese, Thai, and Kru languages, each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese, Swedish, Norwegian and many Bantu languages, the contour of each tone operates at the word level. That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3 × 3 × 3 = 27) than a monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive (phonemic) tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent are word-tone languages.

Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example, a number of Mandarin Chinese suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin Chinese) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable:

After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid-register tone – the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: the contour remains the same whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words, the tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive.

Lexical tones and grammatical tones
Lexical tones are used to distinguish lexical meanings. Grammatical tones, on the other hand, change the grammatical categories. To some authors, the term includes both inflectional and derivational morphology. Tian described a grammatical tone, the induced creaky tone, in Burmese.

Number of tones
Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language of Nigeria is described as distinguishing six surface tone registers. Since tone contours may involve up to two shifts in pitch, there are theoretically 5 × 5 × 5 = 125 distinct tones for a language with five registers. However, the most that are actually used in a language is a tenth of that number.

Several Kam–Sui languages of southern China have nine contrastive tones, including contour tones. For example, the Kam language has 9 tones: 3 more-or-less fixed tones (high, mid and low); 4 unidirectional tones (high and low rising, high and low falling); and 2 bidirectional tones (dipping and peaking). This assumes that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. For example, in the traditional reckoning, the Kam language has 15 tones, but 6 occur only in syllables closed with the voiceless stop consonants, or  and the other 9 occur only in syllables not ending in one of these sounds.

Preliminary work on the Wobe language (part of the Wee continuum) of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the Ticuna language of the Amazon and the Chatino languages of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more. The Guere language, Dan language and Mano language of Liberia and Ivory Coast have around 10 tones, give or take. The Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have a huge number of tones as well. The most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not east Asia.

Tone terracing
Tones are realized as pitch only in a relative sense. "High tone" and "low tone" are only meaningful relative to the speaker's vocal range and in comparing one syllable to the next, rather than as a contrast of absolute pitch such as one finds in music. As a result, when one combines tone with sentence prosody, the absolute pitch of a high tone at the end of a prosodic unit may be lower than that of a low tone at the beginning of the unit, because of the universal tendency (in both tonal and non-tonal languages) for pitch to decrease with time in a process called downdrift.

Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones; the effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing.

Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after the original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called floating tones.

Tone sandhi
In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into a different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin Chinese, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很 ('very') and 好  ('good') produce the phrase 很好  ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as.

Right- and left-dominant sandhi
Tone sandhi in Sinitic languages can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of the word must take their sandhi form. Taiwanese Southern Min is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam5 'salty'; 酸sng1 'sour'; 甜tinn1 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam7 sng7 tinn1 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone.

Tone change
Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi. Tone sandhi is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however, is a morphologically conditioned alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy. Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern Southern Min are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes. Examples: 長 tng5 'long' vs. tng2 'grow'; 斷 tng7 'break' vs. tng2 'cause to break'. Also, 毒 in Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations: to̍k (entering tone) means 'poison' or 'poisonous', while thāu (departing tone) means 'to kill with poison'. The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka.

Uses of tone
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong.

However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood, person, and polarity, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go".

In Yoruba, much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "talking drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech.

Note that tonal languages are not distributed evenly across the same range as non-tonal languages. Instead, the majority of tone languages belong to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Vietic groups, which are then composed by a large majority of tone languages and dominate a single region. Only in limited locations (South Africa, New Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others) do tone languages occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, it may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when one examines the distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality but simply have relatively few members, and for some North American tone languages, multiple independent origins are suspected.

If generally considering only complex-tone vs. no-tone, it might be concluded that tone is almost always an ancient feature within a language family that is highly conserved among members. However, when considered in addition to "simple" tone systems that include only two tones, tone, as a whole, appears to be more labile, appearing several times within Indo-European languages, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families. That may indicate that rather than a trait unique to some language families, tone is a latent feature of most language families that may more easily arise and disappear as languages change over time.

A 2015 study by Caleb Everett argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If the conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it. The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars.

Tone and inflection
Tone has long been viewed as a phonological system. It was not until recent years that tone was found to play a role in inflectional morphology. Palancar and Léonard (2016) provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico), where tones are able to distinguish mood, person, and number:

In Iau language (the most tonally complex Lakes Plain language, predominantly monosyllabic), nouns have an inherent tone (e.g. be˧ 'fire' but be˦˧ 'flower'), but verbs don't have any inherent tone. For verbs, a tone is used to mark aspect. The first work that mentioned this was published in 1986. Example paradigms:

Tones are used to differentiate cases as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania):

Certain varieties of Chinese are known to express meaning by means of tone change although further investigations are required. Examples from two Yue dialects spoken in Guangdong Province are shown below. In Taishan, tone change indicates the grammatical number of personal pronouns. In Zhongshan, perfective verbs are marked with tone change.

 * Taishan

 * Zhongshan

The following table compares the personal pronouns of Sixian dialect (a dialect of Taiwanese Hakka) with Zaiwa and Jingpho (both Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Yunnan and Burma). From this table, we find the distinction between nominative, genitive, and accusative is marked by tone change and sound alternation.

Phonetic notation
There are several approaches to notating tones in the description of a language. A fundamental difference is between phonemic and phonetic transcription.

A phonemic notation will typically lack any consideration of the actual phonetic values of the tones. Such notations are especially common when comparing dialects with wildly different phonetic realizations of what are historically the same set of tones. In Chinese, for example, the "four tones" may be assigned numbers, such as ① to ④ or – after the historical tone split that affected all Chinese languages to at least some extent – ① to ⑧ (with odd numbers for the yin tones and even numbers for the yang). In traditional Chinese notation, the equivalent diacritics $⟨ไหม⟩$ are attached to the Chinese character, marking the same distinctions, plus underlined $⟨⟩$ for the yang tones where a split has occurred. If further splits occurred in some language or dialect, the results may be numbered '4a' and '4b' or something similar. Among the Kradai languages, tones are typically assigned the letters A through D or, after a historical tone split similar to what occurred in Chinese, A1 to D1 and A2 to D2. (See Proto-Tai language.) With such a system, it can be seen which words in two languages have the same historical tone (say tone ③) even though they no longer sound anything alike.

Also phonemic are upstep and downstep, which are indicated by the IPA diacritics $⟨⟩$ and $⟨⟩$, respectively, or by the typographic substitutes $⟨⟩$ and $⟨⟩$, respectively. Upstep and downstep affect the tones within a language as it is being spoken, typically due to grammatical inflection or when certain tones are brought together. (For example, a high tone may be stepped down when it occurs after a low tone, compared to the pitch it would have after a mid tone or another high tone.)

Phonetic notation records the actual relative pitch of the tones. Since tones tend to vary over time periods as short as centuries, this means that the historical connections among the tones of two language varieties will generally be lost by such notation, even if they are dialects of the same language.

 * The easiest notation from a typographical perspective – but one that is internationally ambiguous – is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned digits and each tone transcribed as a digit (or as a sequence of digits if a contour tone). Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic (high tone may be assigned the digit 1, 3, or 5, for example) and have therefore not been adopted for the International Phonetic Alphabet. For instance, high tone is conventionally written with a 1 and low tone with a 4 or 5 when transcribing the Kru languages of Liberia, but with 1 for low and 5 for high for the Omotic languages of Ethiopia. The tone $⟨⟩$ in a Kru language is thus the same pitch contour as one written $\langle53\rangle$ in an Omotic language. Pitch value 1 may be distinguished from tone number 1 by doubling it or making it superscript or both.
 * For simple tone systems, a series of diacritics such as $\langle35\rangle$ for high tone and $⟨ó⟩$ for low tone may be practical. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one workaround). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are ⟨ő ó ō ò ȍ⟩, with doubled high and low diacritics for extra high and extra low (or 'top' and 'bottom'). The diacritics combine to form contour tones, of which ⟨ô ǒ o᷄ o᷅ o᷆ o᷇ o᷈ o᷉⟩ have Unicode font support (support for additional combinations is sparse). Sometimes, a non-IPA vertical diacritic is seen for a second, higher mid tone, ⟨o̍⟩, so a language with four or six level tones may be transcribed ⟨ó o̍ ō ò⟩ or ⟨ő ó o̍ ō ò ȍ⟩. For the Chinantecan languages of Mexico, the diacritics $⟨ò⟩$ have been used, but they are a local convention not accepted by the IPA.
 * A retired IPA system, sometimes still encountered, traces the shape of the tone (the pitch trace) before the syllable, where a stress mark would go. Thus level, rising, falling, peaking and dipping tones on [o] are ⟨ˉo ˊo ˋo ˆo ˇo⟩; these are read as high tones when contrasted with the low tones ⟨ˍo ˏo ˎo ꞈo ˬo⟩ or with mid tones, which are poorly supported by Unicode (e.g. falling ⟨˴o⟩). For a concrete example, when the diacritics are applied to the Hanyu Pinyin syllable [sa] used in Standard Chinese, it becomes easier to identify more specific rising and falling tones: (high peaking tone),  (low level tone), etc. This system was used in combination with stress marks to indicate intonation as well, as in English  (now transcribed ).
 * The most flexible system, based on the previous spacing diacritics but with the addition of a stem (like the staff of musical notation), is that of the IPA-adopted Chao tone letters, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. Because musical staff notation is international, there is no international ambiguity with the Chao/IPA tone letters: a line at the top of the staff is high tone, a line at the bottom is low tone, and the shape of the line is a schematic of the contour of the tone (as visible in a pitch trace). They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, such as those of the languages of Liberia and southern China.
 * The Chao tone letters have two variants. The left-stem letters, $⟨⟩$, are used for tone sandhi. These are especially important for the Min Chinese languages. For example, a word may be pronounced in isolation, but in a compound the tone will shift to . This can be notated morphophonemically as $⟨⟩$, where the back-to-front tone letters simultaneously show the underlying tone and the value in this word. Using the local (and internationally ambiguous) non-IPA numbering system, the compound may be written $\langle\rangle$. Left-stem letters may also be combined to form contour tones.
 * The second Chao letter variant are the dotted tone letters $\langle\rangle$, which are used to indicate the pitch of neutral tones. These are phonemically null, and may be indicated with the digit '0' in a numbering system, but take specific pitches depending on the preceding phonemic tone. When combined with tone sandhi, the left-stem dotted tone letters $⟨⟩$ are seen.

An IPA/Chao tone letter will rarely be composed of more than three elements (which are sufficient for peaking and dipping tones). Occasionally, however, peaking–dipping and dipping–peaking tones, which require four elements – or even double-peaking and double-dipping tones, which require five – are encountered. This is usually only the case when prosody is superposed on lexical or grammatical tone, but a good computer font will allow an indefinite number of tone letters to be concatenated. The IPA diacritics placed over vowels and other letters have not been extended to this level of complexity.

Africa
In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), a set of diacritics is usual to mark tone. The most common are a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet:

Minor variations are common. In many three-tone languages, it is usual to mark high and low tone as indicated above but to omit marking of the mid tone: má (high), ma (mid), mà (low). Similarly, in two-tone languages, only one tone may be marked explicitly, usually the less common or more 'marked' tone (see markedness).

When digits are used, typically 1 is high and 5 is low, except in Omotic languages, where 1 is low and 5 or 6 is high. In languages with just two tones, 1 may be high and 2 low, etc.

Asia
In the Chinese tradition, digits are assigned to various tones (see tone number). For instance, Standard Mandarin Chinese, the official language of China, has four lexically contrastive tones, and the digits 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones. Syllables can sometimes be toneless and are described as having a neutral tone, typically indicated by omitting tone markings. Chinese varieties are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories ping ('level'), shang ('rising'), qu ('exiting'), ru ('entering'), based on the traditional analysis of Middle Chinese (see Four tones); note that these are not at all the same as the four tones of modern standard Mandarin Chinese. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called yin and yang. Typically, syllables carrying the ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in Chinese varieties that have such coda(s) so in such dialects, ru is not a tonal category in the sense used by Western linguistics but rather a category of syllable structures. Chinese phonologists perceived these checked syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. In Middle Chinese, when the tonal categories were established, the shang and qu tones also had characteristic final obstruents with concomitant tonic differences whereas syllables bearing the ping tone ended in a simple sonorant. An alternative to using the Chinese category names is assigning to each category a digit ranging from 1 to 8, sometimes higher for some Southern Chinese dialects with additional tone splits. Syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the varieties of Chinese even among dialects of the same group. For example, the yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin Chinese but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin Chinese.

More iconic systems use tone numbers or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as "Chao tone letters". These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1 and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin Chinese tones are transcribed as follows (the tone letters will not display properly without a compatible font installed):

A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc. The doubling of the number is commonly used with level tones to distinguish them from tone numbers; tone 3 in Mandarin Chinese, for example, is not mid /3/. However, it is not necessary with tone letters, so /33/ = or simply. If a distinction is made, it may be that is mid tone in a register system and  is mid level tone in a contour system, or  may be mid tone on a short syllable or a mid checked tone, while  is mid tone on a long syllable or a mid unchecked tone.

IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising and falling, are widely supported by IPA fonts while several Chinese varieties have more than one rising or falling tone. One common workaround is to retain standard IPA and  for high-rising (e.g. ) and high-falling (e.g. ) tones and to use the subscript diacritics  and  for low-rising (e.g. ) and low-falling (e.g. ) tones.

North America
Several North American languages have tone, one of which is Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. Oklahoma Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 5 rising and 6 falling). The Tanoan languages have tone as well. For instance, Kiowa has three tones (high, low, falling), while Jemez has four (high, mid, low, and falling).

In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for high tone and /5/ stands for low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages for which /1/ may be low tone and /3/ high tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use $⟨⟩$ or $⟨j⟩$ after a vowel to indicate low tone. The Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having two tones: high and low. One variety of Hopi has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language.

Tone orthographies
In Roman script orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in pinyin, but they tend to be omitted. Thai uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Tone may simply be ignored, as is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades. Likewise, Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan, a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone. Ndjuka, in which tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.

Standard Central Thai has five tones–mid, low, falling, high and rising–often indicated respectively by the numbers zero, one, two, three and four. The Thai alphabet is an alphasyllabary, which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel length, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant. The Shan alphabet, derived from the Burmese script, has five tone letters: 🇸🇭, 🇸🇭, 🇸🇭, 🇸🇭, 🇸🇭; a sixth tone is unmarked.

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and its six tones are marked by letters with diacritics above or below a certain vowel. Basic notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:

The Latin-based Hmong and Iu Mien alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the tone) is left unwritten while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. That system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter keyboard without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.

The Standard Zhuang and Zhuang languages used to use a unique set of six "tone letters" based on the shapes of numbers, but slightly modified, to depict what tone a syllable was in. This was replaced in 1982 with the use of normal letters in the same manner, like Hmong.

The syllabary of the Nuosu language depicts tone in a unique manner, having separate glyphs for each tone other than for the mid-rising tone, which is denoted by the addition of a diacritic. Take the difference between ꉬ nge [ŋɯ³³], and ꉫ ngex [ŋɯ³⁴]. In romanisation, the letters t, x, and p are used to demarcate tone. As codas are forbidden in Nuosu there is no ambiguity.

Origin and development
André-Georges Haudricourt established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese. It is now widely held that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. The historical origin of tone is called tonogenesis, a term coined by James Matisoff.

Tone as an areal feature
Tone is sometimes an areal rather than a phylogenetic feature. 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. The process is referred to as contact-induced tonogenesis by linguists. In other cases, tone may arise spontaneously and surprisingly fast: the dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not, even though they were only separated in 1838.

Examples
Tone arose in the Athabascan languages at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo, syllables with glottalized consonants (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey, they developed high tones, so that the two tonal systems are almost mirror images of each other. Syllables without glottalized codas developed the opposite tone. For example, high tone in Navajo and low tone in Slavey are due to contrast with the tone triggered by the glottalization.

Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word ' ('water') is toneless ' in Hupa, high-tone ' in Navajo, and low-tone tù in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan ' ('knee') is toneless ' in Hupa, low-tone ' in Navajo, and high-tone  in Slavey. provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high fundamental frequency, or creaky voice, which tends to produce a low fundamental frequency. Languages with "stiff" glottalized consonants and tense voice developed high tone on the preceding vowel and those with "slack" glottalized consonants with creaky voice developed low tone.

The Bantu languages also have "mirror" tone systems in which the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.

Three Algonquian languages developed tone independently of one another and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following [h] acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative. In Afrikaans the glottal fricative also lowers the tone of surrounding vowels.

In Mohawk, a glottal stop can disappear in a combination of morphemes, leaving behind a long falling tone. Note that it has the reverse effect of the postulated rising tone in Cantonese or Middle Chinese, derived from a lost final glottal stop.

In Korean, a 2013 study which compared voice recordings of Seoul speech from 1935 and 2005 found that in recent years, lenis consonants (ㅂㅈㄷㄱ), aspirated consonants (ㅍㅊㅌㅋ) and fortis consonants (ㅃㅉㄸㄲ) were shifting from a distinction via voice onset time to that of pitch change, and suggests that the modern Seoul dialect is currently undergoing tonogenesis. These sound shifts still show variations among different speakers, suggesting that the transition is still ongoing. Among 141 examined Seoul speakers, these pitch changes were originally initiated by females born in the 1950s, and have almost reached completion in the speech of those born in the 1990s.

Triggers of tonogenesis
"There is tonogenetic potential in various series of phonemes: glottalized vs. plain consonants, unvoiced vs. voiced, aspirated vs. unaspirated, geminates vs. simple (...), and even among vowels". Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. In a nontonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants. That is usually a minor phonetic detail of voicing. However, if consonant voicing is subsequently lost, that incidental pitch difference may be left over to carry the distinction that the voicing previously carried (a process called transphonologization) and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic).

This process happened in the Punjabi language: the Punjabi murmured (voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a low tone; at the end, it left behind a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch and did not interfere with the low and high tones. That produced a tone of its own, mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Punjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked. The written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.

Similarly, final fricatives or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken to and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with Chinese. Two of the three tones of Middle Chinese, the "rising" and the "departing" tones, arose as the Old Chinese final consonants and  disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most varieties descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split in which each tone divided in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced. Vowels following a voiced consonant (depressor consonant) acquired a lower tone as the voicing lost its distinctiveness.

The same changes affected many other languages in the same area, and at around the same time (AD 1000–1500). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai and Vietnamese.

In general, voiced initial consonants lead to low tones while vowels after aspirated consonants acquire a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high or rising tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone so if the glottal stop causes vowel glottalization, that will tend to leave behind a low vowel). A final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as can be seen in the case of Burmese.

Stages of tonogenesis
1. The table below is the process of tonogenesis in White Hmong, described by Martha Ratliff. The tone values described in the table are from Christina Esposito.

2. The table below shows the Vietnamese tonogenesis. The tone values are taken from James Kirby.

3. The table below is the tonogenesis of Tai Dam (Black Tai). Displayed in the first row is the Proto-Southern Kra-Dai, as reconstructed by Norquest.

4. The table below shows the Chinese language tonogenesis.

The tone values are listed below:

 * 1) SC= Standard Chinese (Putonghua)
 * 2) TSH= Taiwanese Sixian Hakka
 * 3) THH= Taiwanese Hailu Hakka
 * 4) XMM= Xiamen Min (Amoy)
 * 5) FZM= Fuzhou Min
 * 6) SZW= Suzhou Wu
 * 7) SXW= Shaoxing Wu

The tones across all varieties (or dialects) of Chinese correspond to each other, although they may not correspond to each other perfectly. Moreover, listed above are citation tones, but in actual conversations, obligatory sandhi rules will reshape them. The Sixian and Hailu Hakka in Taiwan are famous for their near-regular and opposite pattern (of pitch height). Both will be compared with Standard Chinese below.

5. The table below shows Punjabi tonogenesis in bisyllabic words. Unlike the above four examples, Punjab was not under the east Asian tone sprachbund, instead belonging to a separate one in its own area of Punjab. As well, unlike the above languages, which developed tone from syllable endings, Punjab developed tone from its voiced aspirated stops losing their aspiration. Tone does occur in monosyllabic words as well, but are not discussed in the chart below. (C = any consonant, T = non-retroflex stop, R = retroflex stop; C̬ = voiced, C̥ = unvoiced; Cʰ = aspirated; V = Neutral tone, V́ = Rising tone, V̀ = Falling tone)
 * H: high; M: mid; L: low;
 * L: level; R: rising; F: falling

Africa
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. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal (Chadic, Omotic) and nontonal (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, and most Cushitic) branches. All three Khoisan language families—Khoe, Kx'a and Tuu—are tonal. Most languages of the Nilo-Saharan family are tonal.

Asia
Numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan languages (including Meitei-Lon, 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. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, with as many as twelve phonemically distinct tones. Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages are mostly non-tonal, with a number of exceptions, e.g. Vietnamese (Austroasiatic), Cèmuhî and Yabem (Austronesian). Tones in Vietnamese and Tsat may result from Chinese influence on both languages. There were tones in Middle Korean  and a few tones in Japanese. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian and Uyghur belong to language families that do not contain any tonality as defined here. In South Asia tonal languages are rare, but some Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, including Punjabi, Haryanvi, Khariboli, and Dogri,   as well as the Eastern Bengali dialects.

America
A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest (including Navajo), and the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico. Among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec (with the largest number of speakers), Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems. The Ticuna language of the western Amazon is perhaps the most tonal language of the Americas. Other languages of the western Amazon have fairly simple tone systems as well. However, although tone systems have been recorded for many American languages, little theoretical work has been completed for the characterization of their tone systems. In different cases, Oto-Manguean tone languages in Mexico have been found to possess tone systems similar to both Asian and African tone languages.

Europe
Norwegian and Swedish share tonal language features via the 'Single' and 'Double' tones, which can be marked in phonetic descriptions by either a preceding ' (single tone) or ៴ (double tone). The single tone starts low and rises to a high note. The double tone starts higher than the single tone, falls, and then rises again to a higher pitch than the start, similar to the Mandarin third tone (as in the word nǐ, ).

Examples in Norwegian: 'bønder (farmers) and ៴bønner (beans) are, apart from the intonation, phonetically identical (despite the spelling difference). Similarly, and with in this case identical spelling, 'tømmer (timber) and ៴tømmer (present tense of verb tømme – to empty) are distinguished only through intonation. Entire phrases can also change meaning depending on intonation, like the phrase "Hagen gror igjen" which can mean either "The garden is growing again" or "The garden is getting overgrown".

According to Watson, Scouse contrasts certain tones.

Summary
Languages that are tonal include:
 * Over 50% of the Sino-Tibetan languages. All Sinitic languages (most prominently, the Chinese languages), some Tibetic languages, including the standard languages of Tibet and Bhutan, and Burmese.
 * In the Austroasiatic family, Vietnamese and other members of the Vietic languages family are tonal. Other branches of this family, such as Mon, Khmer, and the Munda languages, are entirely non-tonal.
 * Some of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian languages in New Caledonia (such as Paicî and Cèmuhî) and New Guinea (such as Mor, Ma'ya and Matbat) plus some of the Chamic languages such as Tsat in Hainan are tonal.
 * The entire Kra–Dai family, spoken mainly in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and including Thai and Lao, is tonal.
 * The entire Hmong–Mien family is highly tonal.
 * Many Afroasiatic languages in the Chadic and Omotic branches have tone systems, including Hausa.
 * The vast majority of Niger–Congo languages, such as Ewe, Igbo, Lingala, Maninka, Yoruba, and the Zulu, have tone systems. The Kru languages and Southern Mande languages have the most complex. Notable non-tonal Niger–Congo languages are Swahili, Fula, and Wolof.
 * All Nilotic languages such as the Dinka language, the Maa languages, the Luo languages and Kalenjin languages have tone systems.
 * All Khoisan languages in southern Africa have tone systems; some languages like Sandawe have tone systems like that of Cantonese.
 * Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo, have tone systems (languages in California and Oregon, and a few in Alaska, excluded). The Athabaskan tone languages fall into two "mirror image" groups. That is, a word which has a high tone in one language will have a cognate with a low tone in another, and vice versa.
 * Iroquoian languages like Mohawk commonly have tone; the Cherokee language has the most extensive tonal inventory, with six tones, of which four are contours. Here the correlation between contour tone and simple syllable structures is clearly shown; Cherokee phonotactics permit only syllables of the structure (s)(C)V.
 * All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal. In some cases, as with Mixtec, tone system variations between dialects are sufficiently great to cause mutual unintelligibility.
 * The Ticuna language of the western Amazon is strongly tonal. Various Arawakan languages have relatively basic tone systems.
 * Many languages of New Guinea like Siane possess register tone systems.
 * Some Indo-European languages (notably Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Serbo-Croatian) as well as others possess what is termed pitch accent, where only the stressed syllable of a word can have different contour tones; these are not always considered to be cases of tone language. However some languages, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, are tonal such as Punjabi and Dogri.
 * Some English dialects, such as Liverpool and Belfast English.
 * Some European-based creole languages, such as Krio, Saramaccan and Papiamento, have tone from their African substratum languages.

In some cases, it is difficult to determine whether a language is tonal. For example, the Ket language of Siberia has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, as having four tones by others, but by some as having no tone at all. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on the researcher's interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation (creaky, murmured or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, in which case Burmese would not be phonemically tonal, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone, in which case it would be considered tonal. Something similar appears to be the case with Ket.

The 19th-century constructed language Solresol can consist of only tone, but unlike all natural tonal languages, Solresol's tone is absolute, rather than relative, and no tone sandhi occurs.

title: Tone (linguistics)


text:
History of Antigua and Barbuda

The history of Antigua and Barbuda covers the period from the arrival of the Archaic peoples thousands of years ago to the present day. Prior to European colonization, the lands encompassing present-day Antigua and Barbuda were inhabited by three successive Amerindian societies. The island was claimed by England, who settled the islands in 1632. Under English/British control, the islands witnessed an influx of both Britons and African slaves migrate to the island. In 1981, the islands were granted independence as the modern state of Antigua and Barbuda.

Early history (2900 BC–17th century)
Antigua was first settled by pre-agricultural Amerindians known as "Archaic People" (although they are commonly, but erroneously known in Antigua as Siboney, a pre-ceramic Cuban people). The earliest settlements on the island date to 2900 BC. They were succeeded by ceramic-using agriculturalist Saladoid people who migrated up the island chain from Venezuela. They were later replaced by Arawakan speakers around 1200 AD and around 1500 by Island Caribs. The Arawaks were the first well-documented group of Antiguans. They paddled to the island by canoe (piragua) from Venezuela, and were ejected by the Caribs—another people Indigenous to the area. Arawaks introduced agriculture to Antigua and Barbuda, raising, among other crops, the famous Antiguan "black" pineapple. They also cultivated various other foods including corn, sweet potatoes (white variety), guava, tobacco, and cotton. Some of the vegetables listed, such as corn and sweet potatoes, still play an important role in Antiguan cuisine. For example, a popular Antiguan dish, Ducuna (DOO-koo-NAH), is a sweet, steamed dumpling made from grated sweet potatoes, flour and spices. In addition, one of the Antiguan staple foods, fungee (FOON-ji), is a cooked paste made of cornmeal and water.

The bulk of the Arawaks left Antigua about 1100 AD. Those who remained were subsequently raided by the Caribs. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Caribs' superior weapons and seafaring prowess allowed them to defeat most Arawak nations in the West Indies—enslaving some and cannibalising others.

The Catholic Encyclopedia does make it clear that the Spanish explorers had some difficulty identifying and differentiating between the various native peoples they encountered. As a result, the number and types of ethnic-tribal-national groups in existence at the time may be much more varied and numerous than the two mentioned.

According to A Brief History of the Caribbean (Jan Rogozinski, Penguin Putnam, Inc September 2000), European and African diseases, malnutrition and slavery eventually destroyed the vast majority of the Caribbean's native population. No researcher has conclusively proven any of these causes as the real reason for the destruction of West Indian natives. Some historians believe that the psychological stress of slavery may also have played a part in the massive number of native deaths while in servitude. Others believe that the reportedly abundant, but starchy, low-protein diet may have contributed to severe malnutrition of the "Indians" who were used to a diet fortified with protein from sea-life.

The Indigenous West Indians made sea vessels that they used to sail the Atlantic and Caribbean. As a result, Caribs and Arawaks populated much of South American and the Caribbean Islands. Relatives of the Antiguan Arawaks and Caribs still live in various countries in South America, notably Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia. The smaller remaining native populations in the West Indies maintain a pride in their heritage.

British rule (1632–1981)
Christopher Columbus sighted islands in 1493 during his second voyage naming the larger one Santa Maria de la Antigua. However, early attempts by Europeans to settle the islands failed due to the Caribs' excellent defenses. England succeeded in colonising the islands in 1632, with Thomas Warner as the first governor. Settlers raised tobacco, indigo, ginger and sugarcane as cash crops. Sir Christopher Codrington established the first large sugar estate in Antigua in 1674, and leased Barbuda to raise provisions for his plantations. Barbuda's only town is named after him. In the fifty years after Codrington established his initial plantation, the sugar industry became so profitable that many farmers replaced other crops with sugar, making it the economic backbone of the islands.

Slavery was common in Barbuda in the 1700s and until 1834. The island was a source of slaves for other locations, too. No new slaves had arrived on the island since the mid-1700s but their population grew naturally. An estimate in 1977 by Lowenthal and Clark indicated that during 1779 to 1834 the number of slaves exported totalled 172; most were taken to Antigua but 37 went to the Leeward and Windward islands and some to the southern US. Several slave rebellions took place on the island, with the most serious in 1834–5. Britain emancipated slaves in most of its colonies in 1834, but that did not include Barbuda, so the island then freed its own slaves. For some years thereafter, the freed slaves had little opportunity of survival on their own because of limited agricultural land and the lack of available credit to buy some. Hence, they continued to work on the plantations for nominal wages or lived in shantytowns and worked as occasional labourers. Sugar cane production remained the primary economy for over a century. During the 18th century, Antigua was used as the headquarters of the British Royal Navy Caribbean fleet. English Harbour Dockyard, as it came to be called, a sheltered and well-protected deepwater port, was the main base and facilities there were greatly expanded during the later 18th century. Admiral Horatio Nelson commanded the British fleet for much of this time, and made himself unpopular with local merchants by enforcing the Navigation Act, a British ruling that only British-registered ships could trade with British colonies. As the United States were no longer British colonies, the act posed a problem for merchants, who depended on trade with the fledgling country.

As the main cash crop changed over the years, the main cash crops/products grown between 1953 and 1956 were cotton, sugar, meat, cereals, and local fruits and vegetables. Over time, the importance of crops and produce went into decline as other nations were able to sell goods at a price no longer feasible to sustain in the Antiguan economy. In more recent times, however, Antigua has developed a primarily service-based economy relying on tourism as their leading source of income. Much like other islands and nations that rely on tourism, this can become problematic as their success depends on the willingness of others to travel and explore the area. Moreover, this has tendency to follow a seasonal pattern leaving the country vulnerable at certain times in the year.

Political development

Along with most colonies of the British Empire, all slaves in Antigua were emancipated in 1833, but remained economically dependent upon the island's white plantation owners. Economic opportunities for the freed population were limited by a lack of surplus farming land, no access to credit and an economy built on agriculture rather than manufacturing. Poor labour conditions persisted until 1939 when a member of a British Crown commission urged the formation of a trade union movement.

The Antigua Trades and Labour Union, formed shortly afterward, became the political vehicle for Sir Vere Cornwall Bird, who became the union's president in 1943. The Antigua Labour Party (ALP), formed by Bird and other trade unionists, first ran candidates in the 1946 elections and became the majority party in 1951, beginning a long history of electoral victories. Voted out of office in the 1971 general elections that swept the progressive labour movement into power, Bird and the ALP returned to office in 1976.

Social class and ethnic composition
The development of social class of Antigua and Barbuda primarily occurred during the colonial era, where the immigration of British colonists (and subsequent importation of African slaves) created a strict hierarchy based both on race and class; Antigua and Barbuda has been described as "a classic case of the superimposition of race on class and vice versa." Both before and after the abolition of slavery in 1833, the two islands were dominated by a small minority of white plantation owners who constituted the colonial upper class. Beneath them were the Afro-Caribbean population, who "constituted the subordinate working class." In between these two groups were several middlemen minorities: free people of color, along with Portuguese and Syrian immigrants, who dominated the professions of law, medicine, and architecture "and the white-collar positions in banks, businesses, and the civil service."

Between 1847 and 1852, 2,500 Portuguese immigrants from the island of Madeira emigrated to Antigua due to a severe famine. There, they established numerous small businesses and quickly joined the ranks of the colonial middle class, which up until then had been dominated by the island's mulatto population. As noted by historian Jo-Anne Ferreira, following "the abolition of slavery, post-abolition migration became a matter of economic survival for many plantation owners, because of the impending labor problems. There was an increasing interest in and desire for European labor, so the Portuguese, among others, were imported throughout the West Indies to increase the European population vis-à-vis the African population." In contrast to the Portuguese, Syrian immigrants to Antigua and Barbuda did not start arriving until the 1950s, and "are primarily involved in the import business and have managed to establish themselves in academic professions." As of 2008, there were approximately 475 to 500 permanent residents of Antigua and Barbuda who are of Syrian descent.

The Irish first came to Antigua either as indentured servants or merchants; Irish indentured servants were primarily transported to Antigua during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. As increasing numbers of African slaves were transported to Antigua, the island's Irish population began to leave in search of opportunities in the rest of the British West Indies or in Britain's North American colonies. Numerous Irish merchants in Antigua belonged to business families from County Galway, and several Irish-Antiguans formed relationships with Irish servants in Montserrat.

The Afro-Caribbean inhabitants of Antigua and Barbuda, who "account for about 91% of the country’s population", are primarily descended from African slaves who were transported from West and Central Africa during the slave trade, in regions such as the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, the Gulf of Guinea, the Bight of Benin, and Senegambia. 4.4% of the Black Antiguan and Barbudan population are mixed-raced.

Independent Antigua and Barbuda (1981–present)
The islands achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1981, becoming the nation of Antigua and Barbuda. However, it remains part of the Commonwealth of Nations, and remains a constitutional monarchy, with the first Queen of Antigua and Barbuda was Elizabeth II. The monarch remains represented by Governor-General of Antigua and Barbuda.

In 1997, Prime Minister Lester Bird announced that a group of ecologically sensitive islands just off Antigua's northeastern coast, previously proposed for national park status, were being turned over to Malaysian developers. The Guiana Island Development Project deal, calling for a 1,000-room hotel, an 18-hole golf course and a world-class casino, sparked widespread criticism by environmentalists, minority members in parliament and the press. The issue came to a head when a local resident shot the PM's brother. Today, the proposed development is mired in lawsuits and politics.

The Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) won renewed mandates in the general elections in 1984 and 1989. In the 1989 elections, the ruling ABLP won all but two of the 17 seats. During elections in March 1994, power passed from Vere Bird to his son, Lester Bird, but remained within the ABLP which won 11 of the 17 parliamentary seats. The United Progressive Party won the 2004 elections and Baldwin Spencer became Prime Minister, removing from power the longest-serving elected government in the Caribbean. Baldwin was the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda from 2004 to 2014.

In 2014 the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party regained power from a massive win with the leader being the "World Boss", Gaston A. Browne. A snap election was called three years later, and the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party led by the incumbent Prime Minister Hon. Gaston Browne dominated the elections with a landslide victory of 15-1-1.General elections were held in Antigua and Barbuda on 18 January 2023 to elect members of the House of Representatives. The Labour Party (ABLP) has held an absolute majority of 15 seats in the House of Representatives after the 2018 general election, with Gaston Browne remaining as prime minister. Browne initiated a constitutional referendum after the 2018 election, which was rejected by voters, and following the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, he announced his intention to organise a referendum for the transition of Antigua and Barbuda to a republican system. Besides ABLP, the United Progressive Party (UPP), Democratic National Alliance, Barbuda People's Movement (BPM), and three independent politicians filed candidacies for the 2023 general election.

During the election campaign, UPP proposed to raise the minimum wage and expressed support for small businesses, while ABLP pledged to construct more homes and open two polyclinics. ABLP retained its majority in the House of Representatives, although it won a reduced 9 seats, while UPP won 6 seats. Trevor Walker, the leader of the BPM, retained his seat in Barbuda, while Asot Michael, an independent politician and former member of ABLP, won his seat in the St. Peter constituency. Browne was sworn in for his third consecutive term as prime minister a day after the election.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: History of Antigua and Barbuda


text:
Alpine skiing

Alpine skiing, or downhill skiing, is the pastime of sliding down snow-covered slopes on skis with fixed-heel bindings, unlike other types of skiing (cross-country, Telemark, or ski jumping), which use skis with free-heel bindings. Whether for recreation or for sport, it is typically practiced at ski resorts, which provide such services as ski lifts, artificial snow making, snow grooming, restaurants, and ski patrol.

"Off-piste" skiers—those skiing outside ski area boundaries—may employ snowmobiles, helicopters or snowcats to deliver them to the top of a slope. Back-country skiers may use specialized equipment with a free-heel mode, including 'sticky' skins on the bottoms of the skis to stop them sliding backwards during an ascent, then locking the heel and removing the skins for their descent.

Alpine ski racing has been held at the Winter Olympics since 1936. A competition corresponding to modern slalom was introduced in Norway at Oslo in 1886.

Participants and venues
As of 2023, there were estimated to be 55 million people worldwide who engaged in alpine skiing. The estimated number of skiers, who practiced alpine, cross-country skiing, and related snow sports, amounted to 30 million in Europe, 20 million in North America, and 14 million in Japan. As of 1996, there were reportedly 4,500 ski areas, operating 26,000 ski lifts and enjoying skier visits. The predominant region for downhill skiing was Europe, followed by Japan and the US.

History
The ancient origins of skiing can be traced back to prehistoric times in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway where varying sizes and shapes of wooden planks were found preserved in peat bogs. The word ski is related to the Old Norse word skíð, which means "split piece of wood or firewood." Skis were first invented to cross wetlands and marshes in the winter when they froze over. Skiing was an integral part of transportation in colder countries for thousands of years. In the 1760s, skiing was recorded as being used in military training. The Norwegian army held skill competitions involving skiing down slopes, around trees and obstacles while shooting. The birth of modern alpine skiing is often dated to the 1850s, and during the late 19th century, skiing was adapted from a method of transportation to a competitive and recreational sport. Norwegian legend Sondre Norheim first began the trend of skis with curved sides, and bindings with stiff heel bands made of willow. Norheim also trended the slalom turn style. The wooden skis designed by Norheim closely resemble the shape of modern slalom skis. Norheim was the champion of the first downhill skiing competition, reportedly held in Oslo, Norway in 1868. Norheim impressed spectators when he used the stem christie in Christiania (Oslo) in 1868, the technique was originally called christiania turn (norwegian: christianiasving or kristianiasving) after the city (first printed in 1901 in guidelines for ski jumping). The telemark turn was the alternative technique. The christiania turn later developed into parallel turn as the standard technique in alpine skiing.

The term "slalom" is from Norwegian dialects slalåm meaning a trail (låm) on a slope (sla). In Telemark in the 1800s, the steeper and more difficult trails were called ville låmir (wild trails). Skiing competitions in Telemark often began on a steep mountain, continued along a logging-slides (tømmerslepe) and was completed with a sharp turn (Telemark turn) on a field or frozen lake. This type of competition used the natural and typical terrain in Telemark. Some races were on "bumpy courses" (kneikelåm) and sometimes included "steep jumps" (sprøytehopp) for difficulty. The first known slalom competitions were presumably held in Telemark around 1870 in conjunction with ski jumping competitions, involving the same athletes and on slopes next to the ski jump. Husebyrennet from 1886 included svingrenn (turning competition on hills), the term slalåm had not been introduced at that time. Slalom was first used at a skiing competition in Sonnenberg in 1906. Two to three decades later, the sport spread to the rest of Europe and the US. The first slalom ski competition occurred in Mürren, Switzerland in 1922.

Technique
A skier following the fall line will reach the maximum possible speed for that slope. A skier with skis pointed perpendicular to the fall line, across the hill instead of down it, will accelerate more slowly. The speed of descent down any given hill can be controlled by changing the angle of motion in relation to the fall line, skiing across the hill rather than down it.

Downhill skiing technique focuses on the use of turns to smoothly turn the skis from one direction to another. Additionally, the skier can use the same techniques to turn the ski away from the direction of movement, generating skidding forces between the skis and snow which further slow the descent. Good technique results in a fluid flowing motion from one descent angle to another one, adjusting the angle as needed to match changes in the steepness of the run. This looks more like a single series of S's than turns followed by straight sections.

Stemming
The oldest and still common type of turn on skis is the stem, angling the tail of the ski off to the side, while the tips remain close together. In doing so, the snow resists passage of the stemmed ski, creating a force that retards downhill speed and sustains a turn in the opposite direction. When both skis are stemmed, there is no net turning force, only retardation of downhill speed.

Carving
Carving is based on the shape of the ski itself; when the ski is rotated onto its edge, the pattern cut into its side causes it to bend into an arc. The contact between the arc of the ski edges and the snow naturally causes the ski to tend to move along that arc, changing the skiers direction of motion.

Checking
This is an advanced form of speed control by increasing the pressure on one inside edge (for example the right ski), then releasing the pressure and shifting immediately to increasing the other inside edge (the left ski). Then repeat if necessary. Each increased pressure slows the speed. Alternating right and left allows the skis to remain parallel and point ahead without turning. The increase and release sequence results in the up and down motions of the upper body. Some skiers go down the top of moguls and control the speed by checking at the tops. This is how they can practically go straight down the fall line without gaining speed.

Snowplough turn
The snowplough turn is the simplest form of turning and is usually learned by beginners. To perform the snowplough turn one must be in the snowplough position while going down the ski slope. While doing this they apply more pressure to the inside of the opposite foot of which the direction they would like to turn. This type of turn allows the skier to keep a controlled speed and introduces the idea of turning across the fall line.

Skis
Modern alpine skis are shaped to enable carve turning, and have evolved significantly since the 1980s, with variants including powder skis, freestyle skis, all-mountain skis, and children's skis. Powder skis are usually used when there is a large amount of fresh snow; the shape of a powder ski is wide, allowing the ski to float on top of the snow, compared to a normal downhill ski which would most likely sink into the snow. Freestyle skis are used by skiers who ski terrain parks. These skis are meant to help a skier who skis jumps, rails, and other features placed throughout the terrain park. Freestyle skis are usually fully symmetric, meaning they are the same dimensions from the tip of the ski to the backside (tail) of the ski. All-mountain skis are the most common type of ski, and tend to be used as a typical alpine ski. All-mountain skis are built to do a little bit of everything; they can be used in fresh snow (powder) or used when skiing groomed runs. Slalom race skis, usually referred to as race skis, are short, narrow skis, which tend to be stiffer because they are meant for those who want to go fast as well as make quick sharp turns.

Bindings
The binding is a device used to connect the skier's boot to the ski. The purpose of the binding is to allow the skier to stay connected to the ski, but if the skier falls the binding can safely release them from the ski to prevent injury. There are two types of bindings: the heel and toe system (step-in) and the plate system binding.

Boots
Ski boots are one of the most important accessories to skiing. They connect the skier to the skis, allowing them full control over the ski. When ski boots first came about they were made of leather and laces were used. The leather ski boots started off as low-cut, but gradually became taller, allowing for more ankle support, as injuries became more common. Eventually the tied laces were replaced with buckles and the leather boots were replaced with plastic. This allowed the bindings to be more closely matched to the fit of the boot, and offer improved performance. The new plastic model contained two parts of the boots: an inner boot and an outer shell. The inner part of the boot (also called the liner) is the cushioning part of the boot and contains a footbed along with a cushion to keep a skier's foot warm and comfortable. The outer shell is the part of the boot that is made of plastic and contains the buckles. Most ski boots contain a strap at shin level to allow for extra strength when tightening the boots.

Poles
Ski poles, one in each hand, are used for balance and propulsion.

Helmet
Ski helmets reduce the chances of head injury while skiing. Ski helmets also help to provide warmth to the head since they incorporate an inner liner that traps warmth. Helmets are available in many styles, and typically consist of a hard plastic/resin shell with inner padding. Modern ski helmets may include many additional features such as vents, earmuffs, headphones, goggle mounts, and camera mounts.

Protective gear
The protective gear used in alpine skiing includes: helmets, mouth guards, shin guards, chin guards, arm guards, back protectors, pole guards, and padding. Mouth guards can reduce the effects of a concussion and protect the teeth of the athlete. Shin guards, pole guards, arm guards and chin guards are mainly used in slalom skiing in order to protect the body parts having impact with the gates. Back protectors and padding, also known as stealth, is worn for giant slalom and other speed events in order to better protect the body if an athlete were to have an accident at high speeds.

Competition
Elite competitive skiers participate in the FIS World Cup, the World Championships, and the Winter Olympics. Broadly speaking, competitive skiing is divided into two disciplines:
 * Racing, comprising slalom, giant slalom, super giant slalom, combined, and downhill, parallel slalom and parallel giant slalom.
 * Freestyle skiing, incorporating events such as moguls, aerials, halfpipe, and ski cross.

Other disciplines administered by the FIS but not usually considered part of alpine are speed skiing and grass skiing.

Ski trail ratings
In most ski resorts, the runs are graded according to comparative difficulty so that skiers can select appropriate routes. The grading schemes around the world are related, although with significant regional variations. A beginner-rated trail at a large mountain may be more of an intermediate-rated trail on a smaller mountain.

In the United States and Canada, there are four rating symbols: Easy (green circle), Intermediate (blue square), and Difficult (black diamond), and Experts Only (double black diamond) Ski trail difficulty is measured by percent slope, not degree angle. A 100% slope is a 45-degree angle. In general, beginner slopes (green circle) are between 6% and 25%. Intermediate slopes (blue square) are between 25% and 40%. Difficult slopes (black diamond) are 40% and up. Although slope gradient is the primary consideration in assigning a trail difficulty rating, other factors come into play. A trail will be rated by its most difficult part, even if the rest of the trail is easy. Ski resorts assign ratings to their own trails, rating a trail compared only with other trails at that resort. Also considered are width of the trail, sharpest turns, terrain roughness, and whether the resort regularly grooms the trail.

Safety
In 2014, there were more than 114,000 alpine skiing-related injuries treated in hospitals, doctor's offices, and emergency rooms. The most common types of ski injuries are those of the knee, head, neck and shoulder area, hands and back. Ski helmets are highly recommended by professionals as well as doctors. Head injuries caused in skiing can lead to death or permanent brain damage. In alpine skiing, for every 1000 people skiing in a day, on average between two and four will require medical attention. Most accidents are the result of user error leading to an isolated fall. Learning how to fall correctly and safely can reduce the risk of injury.

Health
According to a 2004 Harvard Medical School study, alpine skiing burns between 360 and 532 calories per hour.

Climate change
Winter season lengths are projected to decline at ski areas across North America and Europe due to the effects of global warming. In the United States, winter season lengths are projected to decline by more than 50 percent by 2050 and by 80 percent by 2090 if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates. About half of the 103 ski resorts in the Northeastern United States operating in 2012 may not be able to maintain an economically viable ski season by 2050. In Europe, half of the glacial ice in the Alps has melted and the European Geosciences Union projects snowpack in the mountains could decline 70 percent by 2100 (however, if humans manage to keep global warming below 2 °C, the snow-cover reduction would be limited to 30 percent by 2100).

title: Alpine skiing