13. Tones

Cantonese is a tone language. Tone here refers to the pitch applied to a syllable. Tone can change word meaning. That is, if we change the tone of a syllable, we change the word meaning of that syllable. For example, if we say the syllable si with a high tone, it means ‘poem’. If we say the same syllable si with a low tone instead, it means ‘matter’.

Listen to the example of the syllable si in high and low tones.

We can represent tones visually like the staff in music. The top, middle and bottom gray lines below represent the high, middle and low pitches respectively.

Cantonese has six tones. Each tone is represented visually below.

Listen to the tones applied to the syllable si as an example.

Notice that each black line shows the pitch of a tone from the start to the end of a syllable. For example, Tone 2 goes up from the low pitch at the start of the syllable to the high pitch at the end of the syllable.

We can divide the tones into two categories: level tones and contour tones.

For level tones, the pitch remains steady throughout the whole syllable. It doesn’t rise or fall.

Listen to the level tones applied to the syllable si.

For contour tones, the pitch rises or falls in the syllable.

Listen to the contour tones applied to the syllable si.

Throughout this pronunciation guide, you will be trained to remember the tones using the set of syllables below. It consists of the syllable si in all the six tones, from Tone 1 to Tone 6. It will be a useful tool that you can use to recall different tones.

si1 ‒ si2 ‒ si3 ‒ si4 ‒ si5 ‒ si6

Listen to the set of syllables.