About the XTone Project

We are pleased to announce the Cross-Linguistic Tonal Database (XTone) available to scholars interested in the study of tone systems. Perhaps as many as half of the world's languages have contrastive tone, defined as follows:

A language with tone is one in which an indication of pitch enters into the lexical realization of at least some morphemes. (Hyman 2001:1368)

While tone is known to be especially prevalent in Subsaharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia, and parts of New Guinea, Meso-America and Amazonia, languages with tonal contrasts are found in almost all parts of the globe. Although research on these tone systems has been intensive, conducted within different formal frameworks, much of this work is not generally accessible.

The purpose of XTone is to provide a forum to which interested researchers can contribute basic descriptive characterizations of as many tone systems as possible. The database has been organized to highlight four aspects of tone systems:

1. Representations: The inventory of underlying and surface tones (including contours), the tone-bearing unit, and proposals for underspecification.
2. Rules: The inventory of tone rules in each language including spreading, contour simplification, raising/lowering, insertion/deletion, and displacement.
3. Domains: The identification of tonal melodies ("word tones"), tone in compounds, and tonal properties of lexical, postlexical, and syntactic domains.
4. Interactions of tone with other phonological properties: Indication of any tone-consonant, tone-intonation, tone-syllable weight, and tone-accent interactions.

XTone has been set up in such a way that researchers can enter data in simple prose with a minimum of effort. In the first phase of the database project, it is requested that descriptive entries avoid to the extent possible technicalities of different frameworks and notations. While a query system is already in place, based on these prose accounts, a second phase is anticipated wherein the data will be "normalized" and encoded to provide more streamlined and effective search possibilities.

Although initiated at the University of California, Berkeley, XTone is designed to have immediate benefit to any and all interested scholars internationally. It is expected to provide an important cross-linguistic "clearing house" of tonal information for descriptive, historical, typological and theoretical studies of tone and prosodic systems in general. The varied results obtained from the database can be checked and further investigated by direct reference to the biblographic sources that are also requested for each entry.

XTone Google Search

We have added a Google Search facility to our site in addition to our XTone database searches. If you are looking for information about the languages in the database, please use our search page, but if you would like to try Google's search of our website content, use the form below.
Please note that we are still testing this functionality, and it may be removed at a later date.