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How many tones can you manage? by Chen Jin Feng
F
or some of us who speak
English as our first language,
the idea of tones in a language may seem rather strange i.e. that if a
word is
pronounced with a different pitch, it totally
changes its
meaning. While this may seem strange to people who speak English or a
European language, tones in a language are just a fact of life in many
places, especially in East Asia. Mandarin Chinese is well known (or
notorious) for its 4 (or 5) tones, which make it difficult for people
The fresh food market in
Du'an, Guangxi.
who come from a non-tonal language background to learn to speak it
well. As if that is not bad enough, there are many languages which have
more tones than Mandarin. Some dialects of Chinese e.g. Cantonese, have
up to 9 tones depending on how you count them. Zhuang, a language
spoken by many people in Guangxi Province, China, has up to 10 tones
depending on the dialect. Below is a sound file of the 6 basic tones of
Zhuang, based on the dialect spoken in Du’an county, Guangxi. See if
you can distinguish between the different tone contours (especially
tones 2 and 4).
