# Is Chinese the only tonal language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 2, 2006, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740 "2006-03-02T10:57:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/21 "2006-03-03T01:25:37Z")
> [@snailboy](#): > > From my understanding, Japanese uses tonal accents to distinguish some words. That is to say, some words are distinguished by which syllable is accented. (And the accents are similar to the ones we use in English too, except we don’t use them to distinguish words.) I don’t know if I’d call it a tonal language though as there are really only two tones (accented or not) compared to several in Chinese and Vietnamese. To me, Japanese sounds much more comparable to Romantic languages than other Asiatic languages like the two I just mentioned in how things are pronounced. I don’t understand this example. record (récord) = album record (recórd) = to capture information Aren’t these two different words distinguished only by accent (= stressed syllable)? There’s lots of verb/non-verb pairs like this in English (\*perfect \* is the only other one that springs to mind though). For the record (hee hee!), you can talk about pitch accents in English, too, but they coincide with the stress accent which is what is meaningful. Some dialects of Welsh have a penultimate stress accent but an ultimate pitch accent. ---
**Author:** ![Doobieous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Doobieous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doobieous)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/22 "2006-03-03T01:45:34Z")
> [@snailboy](#): > > From my understanding, Japanese uses tonal accents to distinguish some words. That is to say, some words are distinguished by which syllable is accented. (And the accents are similar to the ones we use in English too, except we don’t use them to distinguish words.) I don’t know if I’d call it a tonal language though as there are really only two tones (accented or not) compared to several in Chinese and Vietnamese. To me, Japanese sounds much more comparable to Romantic languages than other Asiatic languages like the two I just mentioned in how things are pronounced. Tone is applied to _all_ syllables in a word if a language is a tonal language. Japanese uses pitch accent, not tones. I’ve actually had personal experience with this, but if you put a typical stress accent on a Japanese word, you’ll be corrected, because Japanese does not use this to distinguish words (a friend in university who was from Japan giggled once when I used a stress accent and said “pronounce each syllable with the same accent”) ---
**Author:** ![Malodorous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e47774/32.png) [@Malodorous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malodorous)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/23 "2006-03-03T02:27:18Z")
Vietnamese has 6 tones, indicated in writing by a mark above or below the vowel (they use a modified latin alphabet, which makes it an easier language to learn if you’re a westerner). The existence of tones makes for some interesting concequences. For example, since by using the tones one syllable can stand for 6 different words, they don’t need many multisyllabic words, and almost every non-foreign word in the language is indeed one syllable. This even effects their sense of humor, since a lot of words sound alike in vietnamese (and they also have a lot of homophones), they have a lot more opportunity for puns. This constant punning makes thier jokes very hard to translate, and makes trying to understand whats going on if you’re just learning the language very difficult. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/24 "2006-03-03T02:31:14Z")
**Doobieous** : accents are used to distinguish **some** words, but not most. If you put a typical accent for an English speaker on a Japanese word, it’ll sound weird. It won’t really be “wrong,” per se, but you’ll have a very strong English accent and sound kind of funny; like the Swedish Chef character on the Muppets sounds to English speakers. There is an automated English announcement on some of the new Yamanote line trains that drives me nuts because the woman who recorded the station names insists on putting the accènt on the wrong syllàble. It’s Uèno (very slightly stressed), **not** Ùeno (strongly stressed), dammit. How hard is that to say? **Snailboy** : there are actually three pitch accents that I’m aware of, rising, falling, and flat. The famous example is hashi, which can mean bridge, chopsticks, or edge/cliff, depending on the accent. The distinction isn’t used for very many words but it can be important sometimes. Most of the time the words are distinguished from context. For example, if you say ame with a falling accent, it means rain, but rising means candy/sweets. Unless you’re in a children’s movie, you’re probably not going to say, “_Ame ga futteiru,_” in a way that means, “Candy is falling [from the sky].” ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/25 "2006-03-03T03:28:27Z")
> [@gitfiddle](#): > > I’m just curious if there are other languages like Chinese in that one can pronounce the same syllable with different tonal accents and have it mean different things. There are probably hundreds. Right off the top of my head there’s Vietnamese and Thai. > [@](#): > > From what I understand, Chinese is like the Latin of the East, which is to say that most of the languages in Asia came from Chinese (the big distinction being that Chinese is a living language, and Latin isn’t). Other than misunderstanding the analogy, you’re correct. Many modern European have a ton of Latin-inherited vocabulary but that doesn’t mean they “come from Latin”. They’re more borrowings that have stuck. > [@](#): > > Yet, when I ask people from Korea, Japan, etc. if their languages bear the same characteristics, they say no. As you’d expect, if you were asking about tonality. Korean and Japanese don’t have that. But they do have a lot of vocabulary that comes from Chinese. Most of East Asia has a significant linguistic and cultural heritage from China, whether they want to admit it or not. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/26 "2006-03-03T13:09:20Z")
> [@Malodorous](#): > > Vietnamese has 6 tones, indicated in writing by a mark above or below the vowel (they use a modified latin alphabet, which makes it an easier language to learn if you’re a westerner). The Hanoi dialect of Vietnamese has six tones (including the “no tone” as a tone). The Saigon dialect of Vietnamese has five tones (again, including the “no tone” as a tone). Oddly enough, both dialects are written as though the vowels and tones are for the Hanoi dialect and the consonants are for the Saigon dialect. > [@](#): > > The existence of tones makes for some interesting concequences. For example, since by using the tones one syllable can stand for 6 different words, they don’t need many multisyllabic words, and almost every non-foreign word in the language is indeed one syllable. Interesting assertion. I’ve noticed that there are plenty of multi-syllable Vietnamese words. > [@](#): > > This even effects their sense of humor, since a lot of words sound alike in vietnamese (and they also have a lot of homophones), they have a lot more opportunity for puns. This constant punning makes thier jokes very hard to translate, and makes trying to understand whats going on if you’re just learning the language very difficult. I’ll readily agree with that. ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2006, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740/27 "2006-03-03T13:20:52Z")
> [@Dr. Drake](#): > > I don’t understand this example. > > record (récord) = album > record (recórd) = to capture information > > Aren’t these two different words distinguished only by accent (= stressed syllable)? There’s lots of verb/non-verb pairs like this in English (\*perfect \* is the only other one that springs to mind though). > > For the record (hee hee!), you can talk about pitch accents in English, too, but they coincide with the stress accent which is what is meaningful. Some dialects of Welsh have a penultimate stress accent but an ultimate pitch accent. The difference between record album and record a concert is that those are essentially different vowels. If you write the two words out, phonetically, you end up with two entirely different spellings. _reh-kerd_ and _ree-kord_. We happen to use the same spelling for both, but they are not the same vowel sounds. In Thai the word for “horse” and “come” are exactly the same (ma) but the tonal differences in the vowel distinguish the two. The example of how we change a statement to a question by slightly rising the tone at the end of a sentence is a better analogy to how tonal languages work. In that case all of the words are pronounced the same, ie, the vowel sounds remain constant it’s just a slight rise in tone that differentiates the two. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-chinese-the-only-tonal-language/346740.md?page=1)