On average, two out of three languages in the world are tonal languages. This means that the pitch and its contour often determine the meaning of the spoken word. These “tonemes” present one of the greatest barriers for anyone who wants to learn a tonal language but comes from a completely different linguistic background. Some examples of the misunderstandings that can occur are described below.
The fact that the German word for “technical jargon” is “Fachchinesisch,” which translates literally as “technical Chinese,” reflects the perception that Chinese is particularly difficult for Europeans to learn. In addition to the unfamiliar script, it is the different tones that language students fear in particular. The most widely spoken language in the world has four different pitch contours (plus a neutral tone), and those who fail to hit the right tone can end up confusing their Chinese counterparts. Want some examples? Depending on the emphasis, “fei” can mean either “flying,” “fat,” “bandit,” or “garbage.” The term “guo” can be pronounced differently to mean “pot,” “land,” “fruit,” or “pass by.” However, anyone who now feels like abandoning their plans to learn Chinese for good can rest assured: the Chinese—like all speakers of tonal languages—are accustomed to hearing mistakes and have no difficulty interpreting even incorrectly intoned words correctly in context.
When the governor is a lady: Misunderstandings in Vietnam
Perhaps you feel learning Chinese is too easy? Fancy a tougher challenge? The Vietnamese language distinguishes between no less than six pitch contours: high to mid and level, high to mid and rising, low and falling, falling and glottalized, falling and rising as well as checked and rising. The fourth tone has a special trick up its sleeve for language students: it also includes a glottal stop, the unvoiced glottal stop. As in Chinese, the different tonemes in Vietnamese also have striking differences in meaning. Depending on the pitch contour, the small word “ba,” for example, is translated as “three,” “governor,” “lady,” “life,” “history,” or “rest.”
Hip or mother-in-law—uncertainty in North America
The many languages and dialects of the Native Americans take “difficult to learn” to a whole new level. It is no coincidence, for example, that the USA used the Navajo language as the basis for the unbreakable encryption of its radio communications during the Pacific War. Native Americans are also very familiar with tonal languages, such as the Apache languages. They distinguish between high, low, ascending and descending tones, which certainly have the potential to create huge misunderstandings. Get the tone wrong here and you might very well confuse “buckskin” with “bread,” “feces” with “beaver,” or “hip” with “mother-in-law.” We’ll leave it to you to decide which misinterpretation might have the most unpleasant consequences.
A wretched louse? Tonal languages can also be found in Scandinavia
Tonal languages also exist in Europe. There are dialects in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish that make a distinction between different pitch contours. Compared to Chinese, however, these are far more manageable because there are only two. In certain Norwegian dialects, the words for “farmer” and “bean,” for example, can only be distinguished by their pitch, as can those for “louse” and “wretched.”
How much does it hurt? Lithuanian as a tonal language
Here’s another example from Europe: The Lithuanian language distinguishes between the short tone, the sudden, sharp, or rough tone, and the glide tone. In many cases, only related adjectives and nouns—such as “liquid” and “fluid”—are distinguished in this way. However, the tonemes can also introduce bigger changes in meaning, for example, between “to step” and “to remember.” The phenomenon is particularly common when it comes to expressing the intensity of a sensation. In the case of the exclamation “ai,” for example, which is used to express pain, the pitch contour defines whether the pain is chronic or brief and acute. However, since the length of the spoken syllable is also important, non-native speakers will probably make themselves understood perfectly well in an emergency.
