A Very Special Tone

Lots of South-East Asian languages are tonal. That means that changing the pitch of a word changes its meaning. So, like you might say "dog..." or "dog!" or "dog?", when the pitch changes, the meaning changes. But in the "dog" example the pitch changes didn't change the fact that it was a dog, they just changed what we were suggesting about the dog. In a tonal language like Cantonese or Thai, if you change the pitch it is as radical a change as "dog"/"frog"/"flog"/"blog".

Tones go up and tones go down. They also hang around and stay on one level. You might find five or six in a given language. That could mean say three relative pitches (high, medium, low) and tones that rise or fall between them.

But my all-time favourite feature of all languages I have had contact with is a very special tone indeed. I first heard about it in the Vietnamese language. Apparently it also exists in Danish, Latvian and Burmese (I think there may be others, perhaps some African languages - please do mention it in a comment if you know of more). This special tone is the creaky, broken, or strangulated tone. This broken tone is produced by closing your throat up, just like someone's strangling you. I love it! I'm always very pleased to hear about variety and unusual things I wasn't expecting, so that's why I'm so pleased with this creaky tone. I must say, I find it very evocative too...though of what, I will leave for another day.