Praat Manual: Tones in Mandarin

Tone is a contrastive lexical property of Standard Chinese. As a tone language, there are five tones in mandarin Chinese - the first tone, the second tone, the third tone, the fourth tone and the neutral tone. We can use the “pitch” in Praat to analyze the tones in Chinese.

The diagram below shows four tones in Mandarin.

Figure 1 (Excerpt from http://web.mit.edu/jinzhang/www/pinyin/tones/)

Let’s take "ma" in Mandarin for example, five tones represents five different characters which have different meanings.

Figure 2 (Excerpt from http://www.misspandachinese.com/resources/tones-in-chinese/)Figure 3 Four Mandarin citation tones