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Different languages use different means to express grammatical concepts, or the relationships between words in a sentence. English relies largely on word order, but also on inflection/declension (run, runs, ran ... boy, boy's, boys, boys' etc) and intonation. Other languages rely largely on declension, for example Latin verbs and nouns. Grammatical tone is where a vowel's tone or pitch (high, low, rising, falling, etc) changes depending on its word's role in the sentence. An example in English: if instead of adding -ed to form the past tense of "wash", "washed" we gave the vowel a high tone to express the past tense - "I wásh (past tense, high tone)" vs "I wash (present tense, low tone)". http://www.sil.org/LINGUISTICS/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsGrammaticalTone.htm In that article is a few examples of how grammatical tone is used in some African languages.

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