Language and voice

[Plain Jane]

Here's a perhaps somewhat weird topic, mostly for those who speak more than one language fluently.

It is my understanding that different languages tend to be spoken in different places in the vocal tract. For example, English is spoken more in the front of the mouth, while Dutch or German are spoken more towards the back of the mouth / throat.

My own mother tongue (literally and figuratively) is English, but we moved to the Netherlands when I was 4 and I learned to speak Dutch and English fluently (living in the Netherlands I speak more Dutch, but I tend to revert to English when I get emotional).

It has been my impression that it is easier for me to achieve a female sounding voice in English than in Dutch. Perhaps because English, being spoken forward in the mouth, emphasizes more high tones while Dutch being more guttural has more lower sounds? Not sure if I am explaining that correctly, and don't know about other languages.

Any thoughts on that from the multilingual community here? And how about other languages?

[Melody Maia]

Funny, I was just thinking about that. I speak Spanish. I have achieved a female voice in English now, but not sure about the Spanish. Funny thing was that in the past, I used to consider my "Spanish voice" as more highly pitched and feminine sounding than English and now it seems it might be the reverse. I know I have to actively monitor myself more to not drop down when I am speaking Spanish.

[Hikari]

When I speak in Japanese I tend to have a more feminine voice, though not being a native speaker perhaps I am not the best judge. Though diction helps in Japanese too, like the words you say are more masculine or feminine. Though I have a terrible habit of saying "like" in English and the same terrible habit of saying "ne" at the end of everything in Japanese.

I haven't had nearly as much voice success as I would like though, I really need to work on it more, and I can now, that I am out to my wife, so no more excuses.

[Espenoah]

When I speak German, I have a more feminine voice, which in my case is a bad thing. It's strange that it's the opposite of your experience, since Dutch and German are so similar...

[A]

Personally, I find it easier to have a female voice in English (BUT only if I'm alone ; I get too embarrassed when talking to someone), mainly because as it's not my mother language, I tend to use my "official" tone [ya know, the one you use when you hear "May I talk to Mrs. X, please?" while waiting for a job call], which is naturally higher. It's also the only tone I can sound truly female with.

In any case, languages are different, I guess. I know nothing about Dutch, but if it looks like German, it does look harder to sound female in it. From an outside point of you, German sounds, you know, brutal. It's a common joke here to say that hearing "Ich liebe dich" sounds more like "I want to devour you" than "I love you".

[Taka]

When I speak in Japanese I tend to have a more feminine voice, though not being a native speaker perhaps I am not the best judge. Though diction helps in Japanese too, like the words you say are more masculine or feminine. Though I have a terrible habit of saying "like" in English and the same terrible habit of saying "ne" at the end of everything in Japanese.

i once had the pleasure of speaking to some girls from kyouto, and as i was presenting myself as a girl i of course started speaking japanese in the same tone as them. it even colored my norwegian, and it took me an entire week to get rid of it

my experience is that even the tone of my voice is often more influenced by those i talk to than the language itself. if i'd spoken japanese only with guys, i'd never gotten that girly tone even if i used all the typical feminine words and speech patterns

[marelivki]

Yes, you are right. Language has influence on how you sound. Even genetic girls sound deeper when speaking for example Jewish, German, and softer when speaking English or Japanese. It really affects how we speak because of the accent, prosody and stuff.

[Bird]

I speak both english and portuguese.

I can testify it is MUCH easier to sound female in English than in Portuguese. Much easier.

[Eleanor]

I find it quite easy to produce a female voice in French and Japanese, as most all of my friends and instructors in those languages have themselves been female. In Japanese's case, I'm also a lot less self-conscious about using my female voice, as you hear a lot of female celebrities in Japan affecting a higher pitched voice in order to sound cute. I figure if they can get away with it, so can I.

Mandarin, on the other hand, poses real problems for me when I try and speak it in a female manner. It's a tonal language, and I learned to produce the tones within the range of my male voice. When I stop and consciously transpose my tones an octave or two up I'm fine, but when I try to speak at any speed I either lapse into my male tones, or speak in my female voice but don't get the tones right.

[marelivki]

Mandarin, on the other hand, poses real problems for me when I try and speak it in a female manner. It's a tonal language, and I learned to produce the tones within the range of my male voice. When I stop and consciously transpose my tones an octave or two up I'm fine, but when I try to speak at any speed I either lapse into my male tones, or speak in my female voice but don't get the tones right.

Exactly. it's either impossible or very hard to speak your feminine voice in this harsher, more tonal languages, and even if you learn how to use your feminine voice speaking some other languages, your accent won't be that good.

[Plain Jane]

A few years ago I was discussing language with an American cousin, and she said that to her Dutch sounds like Klingon. That is a very accurate comparison, I believe.

I had never thought about tonal languages, but I imagine that would make things difficult. Please educate me on something: the various pitches, are they absolute (a particular frequency) or relative to each other (you can go up half an octave, as long as the interval between the tones is correct).

[A]

I don't get your question, Plain Jane.

[Plain Jane]

OK, let me put it this way.

Does each tone, in musical terms, always have to be a particular note (for example, a "C" on the piano), or is it a question of the distance between the notes? In other words: if you go just a little higher on any particular tone it is fine, as long as you go higher by the same amount on all the other tones?

[Eleanor]

I had never thought about tonal languages, but I imagine that would make things difficult. Please educate me on something: the various pitches, are they absolute (a particular frequency) or relative to each other (you can go up half an octave, as long as the interval between the tones is correct).

I can't speak for Vietnamese, Thai, etc... but with Mandarin it's the latter. There are no specific 'notes' to hit, and the tones are relative to how high or low an individual's voice is. The first tone is high and straight, the second is rising from middle to high, the third starts low and dips slightly before coming up, and fourth starts high and falls rapidly. There's also a neutral tone, which some people consider as a fifth tone. In theory it's as simple as just finding the tones within the new range of my female voice, and as I mentioned, it's easy enough when I speak slowly. But I've already put hours into training my voice to find the tones in my male voice automatically, and when I try and speak quickly I tend to slip back into old habits. Essentially, I'm having to roll back several years worth of voice drills and speaking practice and start from scratch with a new voice. It's not impossible, but it is extremely frustrating, and makes retraining my voice in my other three languages seem like a breeze. :'D

[A]

Uh, octaves are measured by distance - in tones, not in "number of notes". If I remember well, an octave is 8 tones up, so getting something "up an octave", I've been told, is hard because you need to calculate each note separately (because, if my memory serves me right, fa and si are only half a tone each, whereas all other notes are one tone. (NO I never knew the "letter" names for notes in English.) I may be mistaken on that, but I'm almost sure that "one octave up" always changes the note.

[Taka]

@a: you're right that one octave up will change the pitch by that exact measure. but the tones in a tonal language aren't set to any particular pitch (except maybe in you own mind if you've learned one as a foreign language), they're relative to each other in the pitch range you speak in (in the way that eleanor described). you'll also find that native speakers usually start the sentences at a higher pitch then let it drop, and can also easily change the pitch range of their voice as they wish

but for people who didn't learn the tone language as a child, it may be difficult to change the voice range to speak in, because they've consciously "programmed" their throat to behave in a certain way, and spent lots of time to get the relative pitches right. so it may be easy to get stuck in the pitch range where you learned it. i can understand why "one octave up" would be the easiest to change it to, since the tones will sound pretty similar to what you're used to, makes it easier to know what tones you're saying

an octave is actually not even something you need to calculate when speaking/singing. it comes naturally, just like how men will sing one octave deeper than women when singing together. the most natural thing would be for the men to sing five tones lower, but even our unconscious tells us the octave over or under is the same tone/note, just deeper. too hard for me to explain properly, since i never learned music in english

it's so much easier if you've grown up with a tonal language

[Eleanor]

it's so much easier if you've grown up with a tonal language

Yeah, I was going to say that it's probably a problem unique to foreign learners of tonal languages, as my Cantonese-speaking friend had no problem shifting his Cantonese up and down at will and keeping the tones completely intact when we were having a discussion about voice therapy. I imagine you could develop a similar ability if you spoke the language for long enough, but my Mandarin is still not as good as I'd like, and I'm still, as you said, very much stuck within the range I learned to speak it in. Some days I feel like I'm back in first year Chinese class, repeating every syllable carefully after my tutor. 😀

[Taka]

@eleanor: ouch, i can imagine that sucks.. i learned my first tonal language some time during grade school. i didn't even know that's what i was doing. i grew up with one of the few toneless norwegian dialects, then moved to an area where the tone makes a difference, though only between some very few words. took me a few years of unconscious learning to finally hear and speak the tones right, since i didn't live my earliest years there. the words weren't difficult at all, though, same language and only minor differences in pronunciation. except for those tones, even just two of them are enough to get confused

[Layn]

oh this is an interesting topic.

in portuguese my voice is naturally higher pitched (but i'm not sure if mor feminine) and the longer one of my many ... discussions with my parents go, the higher pitched it gets. eventually my father just can't take it anymore
in german however my voice is naturally deeper. I'm guessing that is because most of my friends used to be guys AND german speaking, so i ended naturally adjusting my voice to something more similar to theirs. maybe.
with english i'm not so sure. it seems more dynamic. mhm, yes i think i agree with maiara, it's easier to have a more feminine voice in english.

[Annushka]

Hi girls!
Although this in and old topic, I think this is a very interesting topic.

I'd like to point out some personal experiences to make a question about it.

It is much easier for me to have a female voice speaking English (not my mother tongue).
With my mother tongue, Portuguese, I can't do that good.  Sometimes I can sound very female, but every time I keep sliding down to a male voice or using a falsetto.
Spanish is much more harder. I may be a bad diagnostic, but I believe women's voice in Spain tend to be more on the throat... that makes it so hard for me to speak it as a female.
This gives me the awkward characteristic of pretending to be an american tourist on the country I live to be able to make my voice pass without worries.

And about Russian, it only goes out manly. I don't know if it is because my level is low on this language or because I am not immersed enough to learn female characteristics of the language but it it really hard.

==

My conclusion is that I have to make an individual specific voice training since the beginning - training voice pitch, training ups and downs and everything else - for each language. I realized I cannot develop an English female voice and just start using it with other languages as we normally do with our untrained voices...

I'd really like to know it this also happens with you and what you think of it!!

Thank you, girls! 🙂