English has intonation, which is different from the "tones" that tonal languages such as Chinese have. Intonation is the use of pitch to convey additional infor

English has intonation, which is different from the "tones" that tonal languages such as Chinese have. Intonation is the use of pitch to convey additional information regarding emotion or attitude. Tones, on the other hand, are used to differentiate completely different words altogether. For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).