Pitch Perfect Speech

Signing up to learn a new language always brings some challenges with it. A huge time investment and lots of self-discipline will always be required, as well a healthy tolerance for being seen as stupid or strange as a result of inevitable blunders. Other challenges are language-specific and can include things like strange sounds, baffling grammar, or inconsistent pronunciation. The specific challenge I will discuss in this post is tone. My family and I are currently learning to speak Mixtec, a language of southern Mexico which uses tone a lot.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to indicate lexical or grammatical meaning. That is some technical terminology, but we will break it down in a minute. All languages use pitch to change meaning at some level. Think of how the voices of English speakers typically go up in pitch at the end of a sentence. This ascending pitch can indicate whether someone is making a statement or asking a question. Or English speakers will use higher pitch on a word or phrase to add emotional emphasis to that portion of an utterance. This is intonation, not tone. English intonation is used at the sentence level to indicate the purpose of an utterance or to highlight a certain part of an utterance. Tone, on the other hand, happens at the word level, and different tones placed on the same set of letters can change the meaning of the combination completely.

Lexical tone is used to distinguish the meaning of words. Differing tone patterns change the meaning of words which would otherwise be considered homonyms. As an example, there are two Mixtec words written using the same letters (ninu). For both words, the pitch of the first syllable is low, but the meaning changes depending on the pitch of the second syllable. If the second syllable has a low pitch, the word means “below”, but if the second syllable has a mid pitch, the word is “above”. Just a simple change in pitch on one syllable is the only differentiator in meaning. In other cases in Mixtec, the same combination of letters can have four different meanings depending on the tone pattern.

Grammatical tone is used to indicate grammatical changes rather than changing the “dictionary definition” of words. As an example, in Mixtec, tone is used to distinguish the “time” of a verb. In English, if we need to indicate when an action took place, we have various suffixes and helping verbs to take care of that. (For example, “he read”, “he is reading”, “he will read”.) This is how we know whether the indicated action took place in the past and is completed, is currently in progress, or can be expected to take place in the future. In Mixtec, tone is largely responsible for this. In general, a low tone on the first syllable of a verb indicates the action took place and is completed, a high tone indicates the action is in progress, and a mid tone indicates a future action.

Since tone changes the meaning of words, it is important to represent spoken tone in the writing system of a language. How much tone needs to be written depends on the tonal system of a given language. Mixtec has many minimal pairs (cases in which tone is the only distinguishing feature in meaning) and makes heavy use of grammatical tone. This means that written Mixtec has most of the spoken tones represented as tone markings. As our team begins developing literacy materials, we must consider how to teach native speakers to read these tone markings in the way that is least confusing.

Maybe you speak a language which also has tone. If you speak a tonal language as your first language, it is, no doubt, natural for you to incorporate this kind of pitch into your speaking. If you speak a tonal language as a second language, then you already know the struggle. I can not count the times when I have attempted to express myself in Mixtec only to be met with a blank look or to be corrected in what I was trying to say. The sounds of Mixtec are quite simple, so often my mistake was in the tone. My speech was not pitch perfect and so my meaning was misunderstood. I sometimes get frustrated at the difficulty of overcoming the challenge of tone, but I am also amazed at the variety that God has infused into the world’s languages.

— LH