In phonetics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. Upstep is much rarer as a phoneme than its opposite, downstep. Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... In human language, a phoneme is the basic theoretical unit that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes. ... Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ... Downstep is a phonemic or phonetic downward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. ...

The symbol for upstep in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript up arrow, ^↑, which is not yet supported by Unicode. It's not uncommon to see a superscript inverted exclamation mark, ^¡, used instead. The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... Unicode is an international standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ...

Upstep is superficially similar to pitch reset, which is nearly universal in the prosody of the world's languages. The most common prosodic contours occur in chunks with gradually declining pitch (here transcribed as a global fall, [↘]). Between such chunks the pitch resets: In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation and vocal stress in speech. ...

Been there. Done that.

[^↑bɪn ðɛɹ↘ ^↑dɐn ðæt↘ ]

However, true upstep is due to tonal interaction, not prosody. Hausa, for example, has both phonetic upstep due to the interaction of tones, and pitch reset between prosodic units characterised by downdrift. Here we indicate just the upstep: Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. ... Downdrift is a linguistic phenomenon defined as the lowering of high tones that are separated by low tones. ...

[túrán^↑tʃí nè]

It's English.

In Hausa, upstep is predictable. Phonemic upstep is rare.