English is described as non-tonal, but pitch clearly changes what "sorry" means — how is that not tonal?

There is a genuinely interesting edge case worth knowing, because it is the closest English gets: stress-based pairs.

A number of English words change part of speech depending on which syllable is stressed — the noun and the verb forms of words like record, permit, conflict and present. Change the stress and you have arguably a different word.

That is not tone, because stress involves loudness, length and vowel quality as well as pitch, and because it is a small closed set rather than a system. Linguists sometimes call English a stress-accent language for this reason.

But it does show that the boundary is a spectrum rather than a wall. Some languages use pitch accent — a system sitting between the two — where pitch on a particular syllable distinguishes words, without a full tone on every syllable.

The distinction is real and it rests on what the pitch is attached to.

In a tonal language, pitch is part of the word itself, in the same way a consonant is. Change it and you have a different word — a different dictionary entry, usually a different written form, with an unrelated meaning. In Mandarin, the same syllable with different tones gives words meaning entirely different things, and they are no more related than "bat" and "bit" are in English.

In English, "sorry" said either way is still the word sorry. It is spelled the same, it appears once in the dictionary, and its core meaning is unchanged. What has changed is the speech act — you are apologising versus requesting repetition — and that is carried by intonation across the whole utterance.

The test that separates them cleanly: in a tonal language, changing the tone gives you a word you would have to look up separately. In English, changing the pitch gives you the same word used differently.

The other half is scope, and it is the part that makes the distinction click for most people.

Tone in a tonal language operates at the level of the syllable. Every syllable carries one, and the tone travels with that syllable wherever it appears in a sentence.

Intonation in English operates across a phrase or sentence. The rise is not on the word, it is on the utterance, and the same rise applies to a one-word question and to a fifteen-word one.

You can hear this in a longer example. "You are going home?" rises at the end regardless of which words are in it. That contour belongs to the sentence, not to any word in it — which is exactly what a tonal system does not do.

English does use pitch heavily and meaningfully. It just uses it at a different level of the structure.

One practical consequence for learners in both directions, since this is not merely a classification exercise.

Speakers of tonal languages learning English often find the intonation system genuinely difficult, because pitch is doing something unfamiliar — spread over a phrase and carrying attitude rather than identity.

And English speakers learning a tonal language frequently produce tones correctly in isolation and then lose them in sentences, because their instinct is to use pitch for sentence-level meaning. Asking a question in Mandarin with an English rising contour changes the words rather than the mood, which is a memorable way to discover the difference.