Sing like you mean it! - the Linguistics of Tonal Languages

It takes more than vowels and consonants to speak a tonal language. You need musical pieces called "tonemes" to make meaning. Here's how tones work.

This animated video tours the linguistics of tonality - how some languages pay attention to changes in pitch. Learn the basics of tonemes. Think about the difference between register tones and contour tones. Meet some singsongy examples, including the dreaded six tones of Cantonese!

Animation, art and audio by NativLang

[dcllaw]

Many years ago A friend of mine was studying Mandarin. One night we went to a very nice Chinese restaurants in Minneapolis called the Village Wok. My friend and I are both of Irish extraction-about as white as you can get. My friend, Tommy, tried to order in Mandarin to the young Asian waiter. Young man going to couple times and said I beg your pardon sir. Tommy tried again and once again the young waiter said Sir I’m sorry I don’t understand you. Tom asked the young waiter if he was using the wrong tone in Mandarin, to which the young man replied“I couldn’t tell you sir I’m from Vietnam.”

[masicbemester]

Cantonese: What about the tones, when singing?
Mandarin: f*** the tones

[hugosapien]

I read that perfect pitch is much more frequent among speakers of tonal languages.

[ToanPhan-rsmp]

vietnamese words meaning with diferent tones
hai=two
hái=to gather (e.g. fruits or flowers)
hài=comedy
hải=sea
hãi= to freak out
hại=harmful

[nhatnguyenpham]

Actually, Vietnamese has 6 tones, generally: accute (sắc), grave (huyền), short bouncing (hỏi), long bouncing (ngã), dipping tone (nặng) and no tonal (ngang). Moreover, the pronounciation of these tones is different between north, south and especially central dialects :D

[am-coconut]

The interesting things is that as a native speaker of mandarin (which is a tonal language), it’s still quite hard to recognize the tone of other tonal languages (e.g. the difference between high and low tone in Cantonese)

[stlouisramsfan]

Thanks for mentioning our Dįnę́ language! :)

My people's language, Navajo, has five tones: high, low, mid, rising and falling. As a fluent, native speaker I hear them all. Though, linguists say it has only four but that is not true.

[squigoo]

hihi im learning mandarin and its funny when people make mistakes with tones. one of my classmates was talking and they said dǎ xuéshēng instead of dàxuéshēng and i seriously could not figure out why they were talking about beating up a student.

[jaelleouapou]

My native language is a Bantu language called "Sango" and I lowkey didn't even realize it was tonal until someone brought it up. When you grow up with a tonal language its just so normal that you don't even think about it, I guess. (but like stop saying that we're singing)

[tristanmoller]

It’s so weird to discover something so simple and yet so profound, that you have never heard of before but millions of people use in their daily lives

[RaymondHng]

I went to a Cantonese-speaking Chinese school in my childhood days and dropped out after three years. It was all immersion and rote memorization. They never discussed the concept of tones and that there are six of them. If a student pronounced a word with the wrong tone, he would just be corrected by telling him to mimic what the teacher is saying.

Another thing they never explained to me in Chinese school is that spoken Cantonese does not always use the same words that are used in the written form of the language.

[yurimin]

Actually, traditional Thai has 6 tones but modern Thai now has only 5 because there were two sound that so close together and quite hard for non native. Also, the standard 5 tones are native to Bangkok and quite only the capital of Bangkok. You go away to another province then you fine 5 different tones for the same language. Some area even swap two or three tones from the standard Thai tones. Well, it's complicated even for Thai. Lol

[louisng]

This is a reason singers are often not lyricists in Hong Kong. Filling a song with a set amount of syllables that rhyme and have cohesive meaning is one thing, but adding tones into consideration makes writing Cantonese lyrics challenging.

[Geonordis]

After being alive 28 years, one suddenly comes in contact with the love its life. Filology joins together culture, sounds and language. If I would start my studies again I would enrole in this for sure. Thank you, whoever you are for allowing be to find this

[arshan]

One thing that I have always wondered- How do people actually *sing* in tonal languages? Obviously the Chinese, Vietnamese, Somalians, Hausa, and so on and so forth- These people have real vocal music. But how do they sing if the notes will change the meaning?

[spacekangaroo]

The Indo-European language family interestingly does have one tonal language: Punjabi (including closely related languages of Dogri and Lahnda, which are dialects relative to Punjabi). There are several other Indo-European languages with pitch accent (such as Swedish and the Baltic languages) but Punjabi is the only language that has full phonemic tones - three of them to be exact.

[tuxcup]

Just in case you want hilarity in Cantonese:
The word hɐi in different tones:
1: A vulgar word for the female reproductive system
2: "At"
6: "To be"

Japanese doesn't have tones so when they loaned hɐi6 along with other Chinese words they pronounced most of them as tone 1., and you know what happens...

Every Japanese learning classroom with teenagers or maybe even children in Hong Kong comes with a few chuckles from the back seat at the first few lessons.

[johnhilbert]

I speak Vietnamese and no, nobody ever considered it to be anywhere close to "singing".

When we add a tone to a vowel, we consider it to be a whole different vowel, that's how we're taught when we're young, we don't think of it as one vowel with diffrent tones we consider them different individual vowels. like e and ê are considered to be different vowels.

[Nemo_Anom]

"Intonation" or "emphasis" might be better metaphors for how tonal languages work than "singing". Something that really helped me start to correctly produce and mentally process tones was a video from YoYo Chinese were the teacher compared Mandarin tones to English pragmatic tones. For example tone 1 is like saying "hi!", tone 2 is like a question "what?, tone 3 is like a disappointed "oh", and tone 4 is like an angry or emphatic "no!". It was helpful to learn that English has all four Mandarin tones but that they're not lexemic but suprasegmental/pragmatic.

[xiaomarou]

In Serbian we have 6 tones. They are just written in books about the Serbian language, but not in usual writing. Most of the people just use them without knowing their existence:

In stressed syllables we have:

1. the long rising tone (á)

Example: the first “a” in tama (darkness)

2. the long falling tone (â)

Example: the “a” in laž (lie)

3. the short rising tone (à)

Example: the first “a” in pratilac (companion)

4. the short falling tone (ȁ)

Example: the first “a” in žaba (frog)

In unstressed syllables we have:

5. the short flat tone (a)

Example: the second “a” in lagati (to lie)

6. the long flat tone (ā)

Example: This tone is mostly used for the Genitive Plural. The last “a” of maraka (marks; this is the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina)

One special thing: The tones also apply for the letter “R” because the letter is treated as a vowel.