Natural language and human–machine interaction is a very much traversed as well as challenging research domain. However, the main objective is of getting the system that can communicate in well-organized manner with the human, regardless of operational environment. In this paper a systematic survey on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for tonal languages spoken around the globe is carried out. The tonal languages of Asian, Indo-European and African continents are reviewed but the tonal languages of American and Austral-Asian are not reviewed. The most important part of this paper is to present the work done in the previous years on the ASR of Asian continent tonal languages like Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Mizo, Bodo and Indo-European continent tonal languages like Punjabi, Lithuanian, Swedish, Croatian and African continent tonal languages like Yoruba and Hausa. Finally, the synthesis analysis is explored based on the findings. Many issues and challenges related with tonal languages are discussed. It is observed that the lot of work have been done for the Asian continent tonal languages i.e. Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin but little work been reported for the Mizo, Bodo, Indo-European tonal languages like Punjabi, Latvian, Lithuanian as well for the African continental tonal languages i.e. Hausa and Yourba.