Tone Sandhi in English

Many people who are unfamiliar with tonal languages like Penang Hokkien struggle to master tones. We often say that English is a non-tonal language. In fact this is only partially true. I want to point out to you tone changes in English which, I hope can help you learn Penang Hokkien better.

If you observe English closely, you will realize that it tonal properties in how you pronounce the words, the same way as in Penang Hokkien. The difference is that words in English are always regular in its tone pattern. Rather than having five different types of tone changes, as in Penang Hokkien, English has only one.

You will notice that words of one syllable, when standalone, are usually pronounced in the Penang Hokkien 4th tone, for example tree4 , bird4 , road4 . If a word has two syllables, their syllables are uttered according to a 1-4 tone pattern, hence ap1ple4 , i1ron4 , care1ful4 . Words with three syllables follow the 1-1-4 pattern, pine1ap1ple4 , co1co1nut4 .

When two English words are placed together to form a compound, the final syllable of the preceding word changes from tone 4 to tone 1, the same as in Penang Hokkien.

bird1 cage4 , not bird4 cage4

ap1ple1 pie4 , not ap1ple4 pie4

co1co1nut1 tree4 , not co1co1nut4 tree4 .

As seen from the examples above, English observes a subset of the tonal rules that are apparent in Penang Hokkien, which is, tone 4 becomes tone 1. It is therefore much simpler than Penang Hokkien, where in addition to tone 4 becoming tone 1, also has words ending in tone 1 (which becomes tone 3), tone 2 (which becomes tone 3), tone 3 (which becomes tone 1) and tone 33 (which remains tone 33).

Language Learning Tools

Use the following language learning tools to learn Penang Hokkien!

Return to Penang Hokkien Resources

About this website

Dear visitor, thank you so much for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye and my hobby is to find out about places, write about them and share the information with you on this website. I have been writing this site since 5 January 2003. Originally (from 2003 until 2009, the site was called AsiaExplorers. I changed the name to Penang Travel Tips in 2009, even though I describe more than just Penang but everywhere I go (I often need to tell people that "Penang Travel Tips" is not just information about Penang, but information written in Penang), especially places in Malaysia and Singapore, and in all the years since 2003, I have described over 20,000 places.

While I try my best to provide you information as accurate as I can get it to be, I do apologize for any errors and for outdated information which I am unaware. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have described here will be useful to you.

To get to know me better, do follow me on Facebook!