The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology (simplified Chinese: 四声; traditional Chinese: 四聲; pinyin: sìshēng) are four traditional tone classes of Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of tonal development in the modern varieties of Chinese, both in traditional Chinese and in Western linguistics. They correspond to the phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named even or level (平 píng), rising (上 shǎng), departing (or going; 去 qù), and entering or checked (入 rù). (The last three are collectively referred to as oblique 仄 (zè), an important concept in poetic tone patterns.) Due to historic splits and mergers, none of the modern varieties of Chinese have the exact four tones of Middle Chinese, but they are noted in rhyming dictionaries. According to the usual modern analysis, Early Middle Chinese had three phonemic tones in most syllables, but no tonal distinctions in checked syllables ending in the stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/. In most circumstances, every syllable had its own tone; hence a multisyllabic word typically had a tone assigned to each syllable. (In modern varieties, the situation is sometimes more complicated. Although each syllable typically still has its own underlying tone in most dialects, some syllables in the speech of some varieties may have their tone modified into other tones or neutralized entirely, by a process known as tone sandhi.) Traditional Chinese dialectology reckons syllables ending in a stop consonant as possessing a fourth tone, known technically as a checked tone. This tone is known in traditional Chinese linguistics as the entering (入 rù) tone, a term commonly used in English as well. The other three tones were termed the level (or even) tone (平 píng), the rising (上 shǎng) tone, and the departing (or going) tone (去 qù). The practice of setting up the entering tone as a separate class reflects the fact that the actual pitch contour of checked syllables was quite distinct from the pitch contour of any of the sonorant-final syllables. Indeed, implicit in the organisation of the classical rime tables is a different, but structurally equally valid, phonemic analysis, which takes all four tones as phonemic and demotes the difference between stop finals [p t k] and nasal finals [m n ŋ] to allophonic, with stops occurring in entering syllables and nasals elsewhere. From the perspective of modern historical linguistics, there is often value in treating the "entering tone" as a tone regardless of its phonemic status, because syllables possessing this "tone" typically develop differently from syllables possessing any of the other three "tones". For clarity, these four "tones" are often referred to as tone classes, with each word belonging to one of the four tone classes. This reflects the fact that the lexical division of words into tone classes is based on tone, but not all tone classes necessarily have a distinct phonemic tone associated with them. The four Early Middle Chinese (EMC) tones are nearly always presented in the order level (平 píng), rising (上 shǎng), departing (去 qù), entering (入 rù), and correspondingly numbered 1 2 3 4 in modern discussions. In Late Middle Chinese (LMC), each of the EMC tone classes split in two, depending on the nature of the initial consonant of the syllable in question. Discussions of LMC and the various modern varieties will often number these split tone classes from 1 through 8, keeping the same ordering as before. For example, LMC/modern tone classes 1 and 2 derive from EMC tone class 1; LMC/modern tone classes 3 and 4 derive from EMC tone class 2; etc. The odd-numbered tone classes 1 3 5 7 are termed dark (陰 yīn), whereas the even-numbered tone classes 2 4 6 8 are termed light (陽 yáng). Hence, for example, LMC/modern tone class 5 is known in Chinese as the yīn qù ("dark departing") tone, indicating that it is the yīn variant of the EMC qù tone (EMC tone 3). In order to clarify the relationship between the EMC and LMC tone classes, some authors notate the LMC tone classes as 1a 1b 2a 2b 3a 3b 4a 4b in place of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, where a and b correspond directly to Chinese yīn and yáng, respectively.

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