All languages use intonation (pitch height differences) to express what the speaker regards as the most important information (focusing), to show how the speech stream is divided into smaller units (phrasing), and to show the type of utterance (e.g. if it is a question). In languages like Chinese, pitch differences (lexical tones) are used to distinguish different words as well, making it more difficult to use intonation for focusing and phrasing. For this reason, separating phrase intonation from lexical tones in a tone language is a complicated problem. An additional difficulty, when comparing the intonation of a tonal and a non-tonal language, is that different languages have different grammatical structures, which also have an effect on the intonation. To avoid this difficulty, a language will be studied in which some dialects have lexical tones, and others do not, and where there are only minimal grammatical differences between the dialects. One of the very few languages for which this is possible, is Kammu, a minority language spoken in Northern Laos. An investigation of the intonation in this language will be an important contribution to the general theory of intonation in languages of different types.