Tone Sandhi Pointers

Many of us who are native speakers of Penang Hokkien often take tone sandhi for granted. We learn to speak the language since young, so we know how to tone each syllable by intuition, even though we might not give much thought to the movement of tones within a sentence. Yet when we hear a non-native speaker, perhaps a Malay, Indian or foreigner, speak Penang Hokkien, and the person is not fully fluent in the language, we detect something not quite right.

The issue, in my opinion, is tone sandhi. That's how we change the tone when we string them into a sentence. The words we learn on their own, as taken from the dictionary, is in the citation tone (also variously known as the basic, the dictionary, or the standing tone).

In a regular sentence, the verbs as well as all the syllables of the object have their tones modified, except the last syllable. Similarly, the pronouns I and you also modify in regular sentences.

In my video on tone sandhi, I gave this example:

Words from dictionary: Wah4 = I
boek3 = want
khee3 = go
co3 = do
kang1 = work
When we string the above words into a sentence:

"I want to go to work."

We get in Penang Hokkien:

"Wah1 boek1 khee1 co1 kang1."

As you see, all the words change their tone except the last. The change, or tone sandhi, is quite simple to learn. As you know, all words in dictionary are toned 1, 2, 3 and 4. When they modify, they narrow down to only tones 1 or 3. As you can see in the example, word such as wah4, originally tone 4, modified to wah1, tone 1, in the sentence.

That is a regular sentence. In Penang Hokkien, we also have emphatic sentences. These are instances when we want to stress on particular words. Words that can be stressed include the pronouns I and you as well as the verbs.

"Wah4 boek1 khee1 co1 kang1."

Here, the pronoun I is stressed. (It means, it's I who is going to work, not anybody else.) To stress the I, retain the wah4 in its citation form.

If we remove words from the example sentences, of the remaining words, the last one has to stay in the citation form.

Wah1 boek1 khee1 co1 kang1. = I want to go to work.
Wah1 boek1 khee1 co3. = I want to go to do (it).
Wah1 boek1 khee3. = I want to go.
Wah1 boek3. = I want.
Wah4. = I

As a learner of Penang Hokkien, when making sentences, get into the habit of modifying the tone of all the words except the last syllable. Listen to and observe how the native speaker speaks. Although the native speaker is doing it out of habit, you need to learn it from scratch and master tone sandhi, in order for become fluent.

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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.