Do languages have rhythm like music?

When you listen to languages you do not know, you may notice different rhythms. The timing of the sounds in a sentence, or the rhythm, can vary from language to language. You can imagine that each language has its own percussion beat.

In some languages, the beat is regular, on each syllable, like in Cantonese, French, Italian, and Spanish. For example, ‘The cat is sleeping’ would be ‘Le chat dort’ in French (3 syllables = 3 beats) and ‘貓瞓𡁵覺’ (maau1 fan3 gan2 gaau3)* in Cantonese (4 syllables = 4 beats).

In others, the beat is irregular, on the stress of a word, like in English, German, and American Sign Language (stay tuned for a comic on the topic of rhythm in sign languages). In the example, we have underlined the syllables with stress: The girls will be playing games (7 syllables = 3 beats). When the beat is on the stress, sentences that have different numbers of syllables can take about the same amount of time to produce. Listen to the recording of these three sentences:

1.     Girls play games (3 syllables)
2.     The girls will play games (5 syllables)
3.     The girls will be playing games (7 syllables)

They are almost the same length. And the ‘almost’ is important! Language and music differ in that language has a more flexible beat. It can vary from context to context, like depending on the speaker. Some languages even have a highly flexible rhythm, like Korean, Mongolian, and Tamil.

The rhythm of language is one clue babies can use to start learning language early on, before they know the meanings of words. Scientists have found that babies can distinguish between languages that have different rhythms just after being born. Who would have thought babies were little Mozarts!

*Cantonese is a tone language and the numbers next to the words are the tone numbers.