Intonaation

Intonaation, commonly written intonation, refers to the patterns of pitch variation that occur across spoken utterances and convey information beyond the literal words. It encompasses how voice height rises and falls over syllables, words, and phrases, yielding contours that listeners use to interpret meaning, structure, and speaker attitude.

Key components of intonation include pitch accents, which mark focus or prominence on particular items; boundary tones that signal the end of a phrase or sentence; and the overall contour shape, such as rising, falling, or more complex sequences. These elements interact with rhythm, stress, and tempo to shape how an utterance is perceived.

Functions of intonation are varied. It helps distinguish statements from questions, indicates whether information is new or given, marks contrast or emphasis, and conveys pragmatic meaning such as certainty, suspicion, or politeness. In many languages, intonation works together with syntax and discourse to organize information, while in tonal languages lexical pitch patterns carry word meaning and intonation operates at a higher level to structure discourse.

Study and analysis often involve measuring the fundamental frequency (f0), duration, and intensity of speech. The ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) framework is widely used to annotate and compare intonational patterns across languages. Researchers also use phonetic experiments and corpus data to examine how intonation varies by dialect, emotion, speaking style, and context.

Intonation varies cross-linguistically, contributing to each language’s prosodic signature. It is a core topic in linguistics, speech technology, language teaching, and cognitive science, reflecting how speakers encode and interpret communicative intent beyond lexical content.