What Is Intonation?
Question: What is the difference in the way the following two sentences sound?
A. You are going tomorrow.
B. You are going tomorrow?
Answer: The ‘melodies’ of the two sentences are different:
The melody of sentence A drops at the end, making it a statement. The melody of sentence B rises at the end, making it a question.
Periods, question marks, and other punctuation in a written story help the reader to know about the melody.
In languages like English and Spanish, we call these sentence melodies intonations. An intonation is a melody that belongs to an entire sentence. All spoken languages have intonations.
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