Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part 4 -- Tones

On my first trip to Germany, I heard people saying a word that made me question whether I was really in Germany. People in the market, in the street, in the cafes, all said goodbye with the Italian word ciao. I didn't even know ciao was Italian. I always thought it was French. We say ciao in English too. It's even in the Scrabble dictionary. If you can use a word in Scrabble, it must be English, right? So, I looked up how many languages use ciao as a greeting or farewell. Our favorite open source internet reference tells us that it's a Venetian word, that it once meant, "I am your slave" (wow), and that it's spoken in no less than thirty six languages. As another surprise, the list includes Vietnamese. The word ciao, spelled chào in Chữ Quốc Ngữ, is the word people in Vietnam use to say hello and goodbye.

Unlike ciao in any other language, there's only one way to say it in Vietnamese--with authority and determination. Say it any other way, and you won't be saying hello or goodbye. Say it any other way and you could be saying "rice porridge," "oscillate," "lampshade," "rope," or "frying pan." Or, you could be blabbing in meaningless baby talk. The reason for the variation in meaning is a property of Vietnamese language called tone. Vietnamese is one of many tonal languages that span the globe. In East Asia, tonal languages include Chinese, Thai, Cambodian and Laotian. I was surprised to find out that a bunch of African languages are tonal, as is the language of the Southwestern American Indian nation, the Navajo.

In tonal languages, the pitch and pitch dynamics determine the word and its meaning. The idea isn't as exotic as you might think. We actually use tones to convey meaning in English. Think of the word "yeah." There's: Hey, I just won a coupon for free ice cream. Oh yeah? And there's: would you like some ice cream? Yeah! Or: are you sure you're not a werewolf? Um...yeaaah?

Unlike in English, tonal languages use tone to determine the word itself, not just the meaning. The useful part about each word having its own tone is there is no ambiguity--there is only one way to say a word, so it will always have the same meaning. It would be as if yeah always meant yeah and only yeah, instead of really? or awesome! or, are you freaking kidding me?

The Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Latin letters, with a few alterations. One of the defining characteristics of Vietnam's written language is the diacritcal marks. In an earlier post, I mentioned how some diacritics chance the sound value of a vowel. There are other diacritics as well, and they determine the tone of a syllable. There are six tones in standard Vietnamese, also known as the dialect spoken in the North.
They are:

no mark = flat	` = falling	´ = rising
̉ = asking	~ = breaking	. = constricting

Take the word chào. The tone is falling, which means the pitch starts high and drops. This sounds like, yeah! as in, let's go get ice cream! Chào! This is what you say when you want to say hello or goodbye. You could say cháo with a rising tone, like really? You won a coupon? With a rising tone, the meaning is completely different. If you greet someone by saying cháo, with a rising tone, you're saying "rice porridge." And chảo, with an asking tone, means frying pan. Big difference, no?

The tones in a tonal language are fascinating. When spoken with a gentle voice, a tonal language carries an inherent musicality. And the certainty that tone delivers to meaning is as if the language was designed to eliminate ambiguity. It seems to me that a speaker must choose the words to say what they mean, since there is no way to bend the pronunciation or inflection to convey a different message.

Hope you liked this series on the Vietnamese vowels, consonants, and tones. I'm looking forward to doing more of these kinds of series in the future. Stay tuned!