New CBB

However, those things, while giving keys to one's meaning, are not necessary to the language.

English is an intonational language, meaning it uses tone for emphasis, focus, topicality, and other aspects of discourse.

That's the word I was looking for, but couldn't remember. Is there anything else it uses it for?

All languages are somewhat tonal. What is called the stress mainly realizes as tone. (That's why the real tonal languages don't normally have stress.)
If I remember right, the English stressed syllable has a higher tone than the others, in Russian the stressed syllable has a lower tone than the others. And the stress in constrastive in the both.

That's stress.

Stress in English involves primarily volume and vowel quality, not pitch contour or register.

Not sure what the difference is, perhaps to some of us (myself included), english "stress" sounds alot to my ears like the chinese usage of tone. Fun sidenote, I actually learned some chinese from a friend who's second language is english, and her use of tone is what convinced me that english has it. I've also heard it in numerous documentaries. Maybe there's something wrong with my ears or brain's processing sounds, but they sound the same.

The difference is just what I said: on the one hand, you're dealing with volume, and on the other, you're dealing with pitch.

There's nothing wrong with your ears—your brain is just wired to handle the particular prosodic devices of English, so it perceives Chinese words through that filter. With prolonged exposure, you would start picking up the difference.

For example, I decided to make Feayran tonal some time before I started learning Chinese. In lessons I wrote up for some friends, I explained the different tones in terms of English stressed and unstressed syllables, because I thought they were the same. But now, after speaking Chinese for several years, the difference between a Chinese high tone and an English stressed syllable is very obvious to me—they sound very different. Once I started hearing the difference, I could start pronouncing Feayran with actual pitch-based tones.

Which is why linguists distinguish pitch accent from dynamic accent.

Stress in English involves primarily volume and vowel quality, not pitch contour or register.

Finnish, as monotonous language as we are, must use tone to produce the stress. It's famous for not having different vowel places (laxness etc.) and the vowel quantity is distinctive itself. I don't just know how the tone is.