intonation

Variation of pitch in speech

Instance of: musical concept
Subclass of: prosody

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.

Overview

All data

26 statements · 23% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Different from: inflection
tone

On other databases

21 identifiers linking intonation across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

23%

externally sourced

Source last edited July 13, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

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AIDb. (2026). intonation (Q5576720). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/intonation-Q5576720