A method, of describing, analyzing and classifying fundamental frequency courses in speech is presented. For the analysis of variability of the f0 parameter, the Karhunen - Loeve transformation was used. In order to study the differences between the curves, a discriminant analysis was employed. The results of an automatic analysis demonstrated the possibility of describing time-variable F0 as representing the following typical intonations: Low Rise, High Rise, Full Rise, Low Fall, Full Fall, Level, Low Rise-Fall and Full Rise-Fall in a system of 3 coordinates. A deterministic classification algorithm was developed. The training set included F0 curves which had been judged to be correct imitations of prototype intonations in perceptual tests. The test set consisted of 360 imitations randomly selected from a collection of 1200 and 80% correct classification was obtained.