How do Chinese people sing if their language is tonal?
How do Chinese people sing if their language is tonal?
The answer is: it depends on the language. For Mandarin Chinese, especially in modern pop music, the melody usually takes over and the four lexical tones are ignored. Native Mandarin speakers will still be able to understand the meaning of the song by the pronunciation of the words even without the tonal information.
Is Shanghainese similar to Mandarin?
But, Shanghainese only shares 29% lexical similarity with Mandarin to be precise, that is, 71% of the words are different, including a lot of basic, everyday words – enough that with the pronunciation and tone differences Chinese speakers outside the Wu language family will be unable to communicate at all.
Is Mandarin or Cantonese more tonal?
Mandarin has five tones, while Cantonese has nine different “tones”. These tones are vital when trying to convey your meaning, making Cantonese harder to learn than Mandarin.
Are all Chinese languages tonal?
Which Languages Are Tonal? While the many varieties of Chinese get the most coverage, there are lots of tonal languages out there. Other tonal languages include Thai, Igbo, Yòrúba, Punjabi, Zulu and Navajo. All told, there are over 1.5 billion people who speak a tonal language.
Why is Chinese tonal?
In Chinese, the reason for having tones is quite simple – there are far fewer variations in sounds (about 400) than in most other languages (such as English, which has approximately 12 000), and so tones are used to distinguish otherwise identical ones.
Is Shanghainese tonal?
The Shanghainese tonal system is also significantly different from other Chinese languages, sharing more similarities with the Japanese pitch accent, with two level tonal contrasts (high and low), whereas Cantonese and Mandarin are typical of contour tonal languages.
How do you say hi in Shanghainese?
Hello in Shanghainese is pronounced “nong hoh”.
Which Chinese dialect has the most tones?
Bobai dialect
Bobai dialect is widely cited as having the most tones of any variety of Chinese, though in fact it only has six, the same as most Yue dialects.
Which tonal language has the most tones?
Chinese
Chinese is by far the most widely spoken tonal language, though perhaps it should be noted that Chinese itself subdivides into hundreds of local languages and dialects, not all of which (e.g. Shanghainese) are as tonal as “Standard” Chinese (Mandarin), which has four tones—though some, such as Cantonese, have more …
Is Cantonese a tonal language?
Cantonese is a tonal language and changes in its tones affect the semantics of the lexicon. There are nine tones in Cantonese, of which six are contrastive and there are three allotones of three level tones.
