tone of voice
Refers to the emotional or attitudinal quality of a person's voice, not to linguistic tone.
I could tell from his tone of voice that he was angry.
Linguistic term for pitch patterns that distinguish word meanings, as in Chinese or Vietnamese.
Chinese has four tones.
tone language; tonal language
Compound of 声 (voice) and 調 (tone, pitch). The linguistic sense is a modern calque from Western linguistics.