How can they sing if changing a tone might change the meaning of a word? Doesn’t the “tonal direction” upward/downward of a word affect a melody?
How do those systems combine?
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In most tonal languages, you’ll actually see a lot of times traditional music tries to accommodate for it – and not only accommodate for it but build it into the music in a rather poetic way in itself. There’s almost a bit of an additional ‘rhyming’ layer of the music built in to help accommodate for tone shifts since (as another commenter already said) the tone shifts are relative rather than absolute (usually).
But also in a lot of more modern pop music types – it’s most just on context. So while yes, changing tone changes the word, you can usually quite easily sort out what people mean by context of all the words around it – similar to the way you would for homonyms in English – sometimes because it makes absolute no sense given part of speech or just on what makes sense. (e.g. when someone says “I see you” – we know they’re saying “see” rather than “sea” because “sea” wouldn’t make sense in the sentence but also just inference – someone saying they’re afraid of “bats in the cave” could be talking about baseball bats, sure – but it probably makes a lot more sense through context that they’re talking about the animal)
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To add to the other answers, English is also pickier than most people realize when it comes to your pitch. [It’s not tonal within words, but it usually is within sentences](https://englishwithkim.com/pitch-tone-stress-intonation-english/). When the melody does not mesh with the expected sentence pitch shape, it will sound strange to native English speakers, and is often taken as a sign of a songwriter who is either non-native or a poor writer.
So even in English, the pitch must be accounted for in the writing–this is not necessarily unique to tonal languages.
To add to the other answers, English is also pickier than most people realize when it comes to your pitch. [It’s not tonal within words, but it usually is within sentences](https://englishwithkim.com/pitch-tone-stress-intonation-english/). When the melody does not mesh with the expected sentence pitch shape, it will sound strange to native English speakers, and is often taken as a sign of a songwriter who is either non-native or a poor writer.
So even in English, the pitch must be accounted for in the writing–this is not necessarily unique to tonal languages.
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