In every language I’ve looked at, it’s a convention in the spoken form to give a rise in pitch when asking a question. How common is this? Is it restricted to only Indo-European languages and a few non-IE languages surrounding the area, or is this pretty close to universal? I can hardly imagine a tonal language like Chinese or a language that uses pitch for accenting syllables like Japanese, but I’ve seen this happen everywhere else I’ve looked. Is pitch-rise at the end of a sentence for questions just one of those things that are basic to pretty much every language, or am I an idiot?
Rising intonation, as this is called, is oddly enough also used by some English speaking women when stating facts or opinions. Even more oddly, this is found predominantly in sororities.
Huh. I know more than one male MIT student that, when delivering a complex explanation to a non-expert, lowers his voice and gives nearly all sentences a rising inflection. The overall effect is to subtly imply “you can’t possibly understand such a complex topic, but I’m going to try explaining it anyway.”
You’ll also sometimes hear this being used by people who are unsure of what they are saying (or think they’ll get challenged) but want to sound like they are being authoritative.
It’s annoying.
I can’t answer your question because I’m not really the authority in this field, but I think there are some things worth noting (but I too am probably an idiot). I would say that it is near-universal for a language to have a terminal contour and a nonterminal contour in its intonation. A terminal (nonrising) intonation signifies that the utterance is complete, and a nonterminal (rising) intonation would usually signal incompleteness, as in a question. But when English sentences begin with who/what/when/where/how, they usually do not have a rising intonation, because the ‘question word’ indicates a response is to be expected. In a similar language, German, this also holds true: “was Buch haben Sie?” (“what book do you have?”) does not normally have a rising intonation while “haben Sie das Buch?” (“do you have the book?”) does. Utterances like “Joe? Is that you?” need rising intonation to make them sound like questions. My guess would be that when other elements in a language are used to indicate a question (like English’s who/when/etc.), rising intonation is not necessary. This makes your question much harder to answer concisely.
Not that I’m an expert or anything, but when we were learning Japanese we were always taught that the rising inflection applies at the end of a question… YMMV
It’s also often commented upon as being a significant feature in Australian speech in the last few descades, particularly among younger Australians.
You can also look around under “upspeak” or “uptalk”. There seems to be some difference of opinion as to whether we should blame Australian soaps or California valley girls.
From what I’ve seen, the answer can be both yes and no for Japanese.
If you end a sentence with “ka”, then it’s already obvious that you’re asking a question, and no rising pitch is needed. Some people still do it anyway, but others don’t.
If you don’t use “ka” (such as when speaking casually), then the only ways to tell if you’re making a statement or a question are from pitch or context. In this case, most people rise at the end of their questions.
Of course, some people will talk any way they damn well please, in which case YMMV.
In SiSwati (closely related to Zulu), the intonations were about the same as in English for questions. There was a word often used at the end of questions (yini), but you could still tell a question was being asked just by intonation.
Among the languages I’m learning, it occurs in French, Spanish, and German.
It does not occur in Russian, however. If you want to ask a question, you emphasize the part of the sentence you are questioning. For example, to ask “Eto kniga?” (‘Is that a book?’) you would generally say “eto KNIga.”, but if you want to say ‘Is THAT a book?’, you say “ETO kniga.” There is no rising in tone at the end of a sentence unless the last element of the sentence happens to be the element you’re questioning, as in “eto CHAI.” (‘Is that tea?’).
In Lojban and Esperanto, it’s not mandatory, but it’s not prohibited either. Of course, these are constructed languages as opposed to naturally evolved ones, so perhaps they won’t answer your question.
After muttering several questions to myself in Mandarin, I’d say that a rising tone for a question does not occur in Chinese. If anything, most questions seem to end with kind of a low-pitched, staccatto tone.
Chinese questions can end with a question marker “ma”, similar to Japanese “ka”, or can take the form of “something not something”.
“Are you well?” could thus be rendered as ni hao ma (literally, "you good ma "?) or alternately as ni hao bu hao (literally, “you good not good”?). In either case, the “ma” or the second “hao” seem to be downbeat and short.
I’d think the rising intonation (in opinions, anyway) is because the speaker wishes to imply, “do you what I’m saying?” (ie. are you paying attention?), but instead of adding the extra phrase on the end, they just raise their intonation.
If someone ever states an opinion like that to you (“Well, I don’t really like him?”) you almost always find yourself agreeing with the statement.
Id like to point out that in English rising pitch is used with “yes/no” questions, such as “Is fred home?”. Information questions go down, like “Who else is home?”.
An intersting exception is the tag question, technically a “yes/no” question. This one can go either way. Try this sentence with both rising and falling: “Fred isnt home, is he?” With falling, the implication is that you arent expecting Fred to be home, and with rising pitch the implication is that you are less sure Fred isnt home!
German, the only other language I speak, works exactly the same as English. In fact, in German there is something similar to our tag question in phrases such as “…oder?” (or?), “…nicht wahr?” (not true?). They have the same rising or falling pitch variations English does.
RK
Sorry to say, but that’s just not correct. Palve IS right that Russian is a perfect example of an Indo-European language that doesn’t use rising end-of-sentence intonation to indicate a question.
Russian intonation signals a question in two ways.
For a yes / no question, like “Do you want to go to the movies,” the intonation rises and falls sharply and quickly on the word in question, in this case “like”:
KHOCHESH’ poiti v kino?
For a question-word question, like “What do you think” the intonation falls sharply and emphatically on the question word:
CHTO ty dumaesh’?
I was an Assistant English Teacher in Japan several years ago, working in public junior high schools. Most of my students were 7th graders, beginners in English who found it very difficult to remember to raise intonation at the end of a question. I suspect it was because in English we signal questions in (at least) two ways: tone rising, and changed syntax: Aux. verb-subject-verb, instead of subject-aux. verb-verb. (Are you going? v. You are going.) By the time they’d remembered the changed syntax, they’d lost the changed intonation.
Come to think of it, since we do change our syntax, it’s interesting that we even bother with changing intonation as well. But I suspect that’s a subject for another thread.
It’s not even universal in English. I first noticed this when I started to interact with Real Southerners in large numbers. Many single statements, including questions, tended to start off fast and end up slow. Like:
“Wantdoyou want to know fo…r?”
With a slowdown of speech at the end, you can’t really fit in a rising intonation. If anything, it falls.
But you don’t run into Real Southerners much anymore in the biggest Southern cities.
Well, that’s what I get for learning intonation matters from a book. sigh If I had a real Russian teacher, I would know these things.