intonation (linguistics)

In linguistics, intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and  stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance to convey surprise and irony or to change a statement to a question. Such languages are called intonation languages. English and French are well-known examples. Some languages use pitch to distinguish words; these are known as tonal languages. Chinese, Thai, and Hausa are examples. An intermediate position is occupied by languages with tonal word accent, for instance Norwegian or Japanese.
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