How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?

Question

Among historically low income/education groups in the US and in my native Mexico City, "ghetto talk" is heavy on the use of pitch to convey meaning. I've always attributed this to people compensating for a lack of vocabulary with pitch cues.

So I'm wondering what "ghetto talk" is like in tonal languages. How do they "compensate" if not through pitch (which, I assume, would make things very confusing)? Or maybe my assumption about the relationship between pitch and the command of language in the West is just plain wrong...

My exposure to tonal languages is minimal, so I would really appreaciate an apples and oranges answer.

Edit: It was pointed out to me that my question could be interpreted as saying that tonal languages are somehow inferior to others. This is most definitely not what I mean, as arguing that variations in pitch are an objectively worse or better phonetic solution than consonants or vowels would be silly.

Answer 1

Lexical tones and prosody peacefully co-exist in these languages. The speakers intuitively use only those pitch contours that do not overlap with the lexical tones.

Even more, sometimes an exaggerated tone may serve as an intonation, and this is used in "ghetto talk".

Tonal contours in normal speech

Native speakers often dilute the lexical tones in day-by-day conversation. This phenomenon also becomes evident in situations when preserving tones is somewhat complicated: See this answer for how Chinese and Thai song writers differently deal with the situations when following melody contradict the lexical tones.

An example from personal experience

As an expat who lives in Thailand and studies Thai language, I tend to use the tones "properly", as they are taught in schools, unlike the natives who often "dilute" the tones. I'm often being told that my speech sounds more emotional than it should be. Trying to use less vivid tones solves the problem.

An example

Check the following video (YouTube). It's a trailer of a youth comedy "ATM: Er Rak Error". You will see many situations young people use slang, impolite expressions, and even expletives (to an extent it is allowed for use in movies rolled in theater and TV). Pay special attention to scenes when the young people talk to each other (when no boss around), and especially the final scene (at time mark 02:25). You will definitely notice extremely vivid tone contours for swear words.

Answer 2

Yes, your assumption on a correlation between pitch variance and vocabulary size is wrong. The use of pitch you speak of is called "prosody" in linguistics; different speaking groups in society may use different levels of pitch in their prosody, or even different prosodic melodies, without any predefined relationship to vocabulary or social standing (for example, in many Anglophone communities higher pitch variance may be associated with femininity, rather than ghetto-ness; while for a Japanese native of Morioka, Iwate, unusually high pitch variance may just signal the speaker as coming from the nearby city of Miyako).

Prosody is pitch at the level of phrases and sentences; tone is pitch at the level of words or syllables. In a tonal language, the shorter pitch sequences (tones) modulate the overall melody of the sentence (prosody), "like waves riding atop larger waves". Different speaking groups (and individual speakers) may vary the pitch more strikingly or more subtly, both in the wider prosodic melody, or in the shorter tonal notes; though, again, this difference isn't caused by vocabulary size or lack thereof.