9/10/2017 The Linguistic Mystery of Tonal Languages - The Atlantic

The Worlds Most Musical Languages

Why one syllable spoken at different pitches can have seven meanings

An ethnic Hmong boy plays the lusheng to welcome the new year in Guizhou province, China.
China Stringer Network / Reuters
JOHN MCWHORTER

NOV 13, 2015 | GLOBAL

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People dont generally speak in a monotone. Even someone who couldnt carry a
tune if it had a handle on it uses a dierent melody to ask a question than to make a
statement, and in a sentence like It was the rst time I had even been there, says
been on a higher pitch than the rest of the words.

Still, if someone speaks in a monotone in English, other English-speakers can easily

understand. But in many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels
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for distinguishing one word from another. In English, pay and bay are dierent
because they have dierent starting sounds. But imagine if pay said on a high
pitch meant to give money, while pay said on a low pitch meant a broad inlet
of the sea where the land curves inward. Thats what it feels like to speak what
linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it
their entire lives and think nothing of it.

Mandarin Chinese, with its four tones, is a typical example. Take the word ma. If
you say it the way an English-speaker would say it, just reading it sitting by itself on
a page, then it means scold. Say ma as if you were looking for your motherma?
and it means rough. If you were just whining at herma-a-a?!?with your
voice swooping down a bit and then back up even higher, that would mean, believe
it or not, horse. And if you say ma on a high pitch, as if you were singing the rst
syllable of The Star-Spangled Banner as ma instead of oh for some reason, that
would actually mean mother. Thats the way almost every syllable works in
Chinese.

As tone languages go, Mandarin is by no means the most complicated. The Hmong
language, spoken in China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, can have seven or even
eight tones. Its dazzling, really. If you say paw like a statement, it means female.
Say it like a question and it means to throw. Say it up high in an impatient way
and youre saying ball. Say it down low as if you ran into someone in a basement
and didnt want anyone upstairs to know you were down there, and it means
thorn. Say it in a tone between the impatient high and the down-low and it means
pancreas. If you say paw in a creaky waykind of like the way one might imitate
an elderly persons voicethen it means to see, while if you say it in a breathy,
amazed way as if you were seeing a horsey in the clouds, then it means paternal
grandmother. (For what its worth, maternal grandmother is tai, said on the
basement tone.)

Tone languages are spoken all over the world, but they tend to cluster in three
places: East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous
communities of Mexico. Why there and not elsewhere? One thing these regions

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might have in common is heat, though its hard to imagine how that would make
people speak more melodically. Yet environment may not be entirely unrelated to
the phenomenonaccording to one hypothesis, tone languages are less likely to
develop in dry environments because dry air deprives the vocal cords of the
suppleness required to produce subtle dierences in tone.

In one dialect of Khmu, pok on a high tone means bite,

while pok on a low tone means to cut down a tree.

The jury is still out on that one, but even if it turns out to be true, it only gets us so
far. The theory proposes that where the climate isnt dry, theres no predicting
whether a language will take on tones or not. As such, its easy to supposeand fun
to imaginethat people decide to sing language out of some kind of cultural
impulse. The reality is less groovy, but just as interesting.

Its ultimately a matter of one thing leading to another. Take the words pay and
bay. It looks like the only dierence between them is that they start with dierent
letters, but theres more to it up close. English-speakers tend to say the ay sound on
a slightly lower pitch after a b than after a p, because of the dierent mechanics
involved in saying those consonants. That is, one tends to say pay a little higher
than one says bay. In daily life thats so subtle as to be barely noticeable: What
stands out is the good old dierence between p and b. But p and b are very similar
sounds, and sounds that are similar have a way of melting togethera Cockney
English-speaker can say bref for breath and ng for thing because the f and th
sounds are made close together at the front of the mouth. Suppose as time went by
English-speakers started pronouncing b as p so that there was no more b sound at
all?

Imagine: Brother is prother, bat is pat, big is pig. Things like that
happen in languages all the time, and if it happened to English, then instead of
pay and bay there would just be pay and payexcept there would still be
that dierence in the tone. Pay with a neutral tone would mean pay, while

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pay with a low tone would mean bay. The tone alone would convey the
dierence in meaning. This is exactly how a tone language happens, and in some
places you can even see the steps in the process. For example, there is a language
called Khmu spoken in parts of Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China. In one dialect
of Khmu, pok means bite and bok means to cut down a tree. In another dialect,
though, b has become p, and all thats left behind is the dierence in the tone, as if
the Cheshire Cat had left behind his smile. Thus in that dialect, pok on a high tone
means bite, while pok on a low tone means to cut down a tree.

In one experiment, Mandarin-speaking musicians were

better at identifying musical pitches than English-
speaking ones.

There are certain advantages to speaking tone languages. Speakers of some African
languages can communicate across long distances playing the tones on drums, and
Mazatec-speakers in Mexico use whistling for the same purpose. You know those
people who can hear a stray note and instantly identify its pitch, for instance
recognizing that a certain car horn is an A at? They have absolute pitch, and
there is evidence that speakers of tone languages are more likely to have it. In one
experiment, for instance, Mandarin-speaking musicians were better at identifying
musical pitches than English-speaking ones. The same has been found for speakers
of Cantonesewhich has six or even nine tones, depending on how you count
relative to English- and French-speakers.

Could a language rely completely on tones? As key as tones can be to conveying

meaning, they arent ne-grained enough by themselves to communicate the full
range of human expressionspeaking only in tones would be akin to writing only in
emojis. The tone-language counterpart to the new all-emoji translation of Moby-
Dick, for example, would have been a language created by a Frenchman in the
1820s called Solresol, which was based solely on musical tones. Do-re-mi was
day, do-re-fa was week, do-re-sol was month, and so on; mi-sol was good,
and the reverse, sol-mi, was bad. Cute idea, but Solresol would have been no

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more able to equal the speed, nuance, and complexity of actual speech than Emoji-
Dick can render the magnicence of Melvilles prose.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of The Power of Babel,
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, What Language Is, and The Language Hoax.

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