Speaking Of Words: Let's Talk Tongue

By Michael Ferber, Speaking of Words, InDepth NH

Have you ever thought about what a wonderful little organ your tongue is? A little muscle weighing about three ounces at full size, the tongue has two marvelous talents—it tastes and talks—as well as some subsidiary ones. It has thousands of tiny taste buds that let us distinguish a vast number of flavors. Four or five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and maybe umami—somehow combine in subtle mixtures so we can tell (and enjoy) the difference, with a little practice, between a California Zinfandel with notes of blackberry, anise, and pepper and a California Zinfandel with notes of raspberry, cedar, and vanilla. Of course the nose plays a part in this skill, another amazing little organ, but this is a column on language so it’s the tongue I want to talk about.

Besides its genius for taste, the tongue is the chief organ of speech. It races around in the mouth at lightning speed, stopping at or grazing by a dozen spots in the mouth every second, coordinating with the vocal cords and lips, and rarely making a mistake. Is your sister still teaching? takes about a second to say at normal rapid speed, and in that second your tongue has to move in and out of some twenty positions, even during the vowels: its tip buzzes (while your vocal chords resonate) near the hard palate (the alveolus) during the -s in is, then its top rises near the back of that palate for the y-, then it drops down for the rear vowel of your, then withdraws for the -r; it zips back to a voiceless hiss near the alveolus for sister (twice), makes a voiceless contact with the alveolus for the -t-, and so on and so on at such a blur it seems automatic and barely analyzable. Somehow the mind or brain must be governing all this, but the tongue seems to have a mind of its own, as our President has repeatedly demonstrated.

The busy tongue gets a few milliseconds of down time when the lips play their part. In English there are six phonemes, or meaningfully distinct sounds, that we make with both lips or with the lower one and the upper teeth: bilabial p, b, m, and w, and labio-dental f and v. (The w is called an approximant, as the lips only approach each other and do not touch.) When we breathe out an h the tongue can also just stand by and listen. But otherwise the tongue is constantly busy, and it never gets tired.

There are some languages, such as Tlingit, that lack labial phonemes altogether. A whacky theory about it claims that, in the winter at least, Tlingit lips would be frozen together, but if that were true what their even busier tongues were doing inside the mouth could not be understood, and they would also starve to death.

English has a fairly normal number of phonemes, though we are a little heavy in fricatives: f, v, th (voiceless, as in thick), th (voiced, as in this), s, z, sh, and zh (or the s in measure and the z in azure), eight of them, not counting h. Some foreigners find our language a little hissy or fizzy. But some languages have over a hundred distinct phonemes, far more than necessary, including dozens of clicks and other sounds weird to our ears.

But our tongues are clever. If we work at it, or start young enough, we can learn to say any number of the world’s phonemes properly. An experiment at MIT with babies seemed to show that they could distinguish slight differences in sounds they had never heard before, as if they already “knew” all the possible phonemes they might need in whatever language or languages they would one day learn to speak. We also have no trouble making some non-phonemic sounds in English, such as the “alveolar suck,” often written (poorly) as tsk or tut and used to express disapproval. We also make the glottal stop all the time, as in the middle of oh-oh (worry) or uh-uh (no), but in many other places too, such as in kitten and couldn’t, replacing the -tt- or the -d-. The glottal stop is not a phoneme in English, but it is in some other languages. And we skillfully produce a sound called the “interdental trill” better known as the raspberry or Bronx cheer, though it is not a phoneme, I hope, in any language.

Babies not only love to put things in their mouths, to the despair of the parents, but they love to play with sounds: they babble and lall, chant and giggle, rhyme and alliterate for the sheer joy of it, all good evidence, along with the speed with which they become fluent in their parents’ language, that the speech faculty is built genetically into the human brain and human tongue.

So it is not an accident or a mere figure of speech that we use tongue to mean “language.” Indeed language comes from French, which put a suffix in the word it inherited from Latin, lingua, which could mean both “tongue” (the organ) and “language” and gives us our word linguistics. The Greek word for “tongue,” glossa, gives us gloss, meaning “comment on a word” in a text, and glossary. The same Greek word in a different dialect, glotta, gives us glottis, the opening between the vocal cords, epiglottis, a lid over the glottis during swallowing, glottal stop, and polyglot, someone who speaks a lot of languages.

So drop by and thank your marvelous tongue someday soon. Stay for a chat. It loves to talk.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Website: https://www.michaelkferber.com/.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.