Does Japanese have tones?

Japanese doesn’t use tones. It’s not like Mandarin or Cantonese where using different tones changes the meaning of a word. You can however ask a question by raising your tone. eg. read more

Japanese doesn’t have Chinese-style tones, where what’s important is the pitch changes within a syllable. Rather it has a pitch accent, where what’s important is the pitch changes between syllables. In some cases the pitch pattern distinguishes words that are otherwise homophones. read more

Japanese has inflections or change of "suffixes" to mean different things, similar to English, but no tones are used, even though it's an East Asian Language. Neither does Korean, which is strange concerning that both languages borrowed many words from a tonal language called Chinese. read more