Tone is one of the commonest occurrences in human languages.Most lan-guages in the world have tones,of which the African tone languages account for a majority.For Chinese scholars,tone is not something strange,yet scarce attention has been paid to the tones of African languages.Scholars have conducted deep-level studies on tones of Chinese and reached some consensus,but have yet to prove whether their understanding of tones is cross-linguistically applicable,and hence the African tone languages are a proper yardstick.From the viewpoint of a Chinese tone researcher,this pa-per introduces briefly the western scholars'achievements on African lan-guage tones,reflects on the existing research issues regarding the African language tones and the methods involved,and explores the potential devel-opment of research on African language tones.
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