A floating tone is a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes. In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ...

An example occurs in Bambara. Bambara has two phonemic tones, high and low. In this language, the definite article is a floating low tone. With a noun in isolation, it docks to the preceding vowel, turning a high tone into a falling tone: [bá] river; [bâ] the river. When it occurs between two high tone, it downsteps the following tone: [bá tɛ́] it's not a river; [bá tɛ̄] (or [bá ^↓ tɛ́])it's not the river. Bambara, also known as Bamanankan in the language itself, is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people (including second language users). ... In human language, a phoneme is the basic theoretical unit that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes. ... Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ... Downstep is a phonemic or phonetic downward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. ...