This project is based at the Institut nationale des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO, Paris). The project team is located at LLACAN (CNRS, UMR-8135). The project is funded by the ERC Advanced grant to Valentin Vydrin.

Linguistic tone as a suprasegmental characteristic of certain languages, consisting in the use of pitch to encode lexical and/or grammatical meanings.

In our project, by “tonal language” is meant any language where «pitch enters into the lexical realization of at least some morphemes» (Hyman, 2009).

More than 40% of all the languages of the world are tonal.

The central place in the approach adopted in this project is occupied by the notion of toneme. A toneme can be defined as a meaningful tone, i.e. a tone which can (potentially) distinguish lexical and/or grammatical meanings.

The main aim of the project is to identify the types of tonal systems of languages of the world and typical trends of dynamics of these systems. The project will accumulate comprehensive data on the role of tones in phonological systems of the world’s languages: structure of tonal systems, functional load of tone (expressed in the terms of tonal density) in each particular language system, role of tone in distinguishing lexical and/or grammatical meanings.