Let's Talk Intonation!

Intonation is defined as being the variations of pitch we use in everyday speech, but it is not used to distinguish between words. The most common example of intonation we all know is the rising of our pitch when posing a question. Alright, so now that you know what it is, let's talk about it!

I work in a fast food place, and we get all kinds of strange people come through in the run of a day. While working last night, I had to serve a man who spoke in nothing but rised intonations. Pretty much what this means is this man goes around talking like he's surprised all the time. The encounter I had with this man was fairly informal, as we just generally chatted while he waited for his food to be prepared, and only lasted for a period of around five minutes. There were three people total involved in the conversation, myself, the customer and another employee at the store (who found the way he spoke equally as strange as I did).

We all know, of course, that most of us do not talk in all rised intonations (unless we are actually surprised). For a normal declarative statement, most of us follow the regular 2-3-1 pattern of rises and falls for English, with one being low, two being middle and three being high. The other rate on the scale would be a four, which means a very high intonation. The pitch this man spoke in all the time rose from a three to a four, and this made him quite difficult to speak to. When someone does not change the pitch of their speech at all (whether it be all high or all low), we cannot pick up on the normal cues we are used to when speaking. For example, most of us know, as earlier stated, we rise our voices when posing a question to someone, therefore changing the pitch of our voice, typically at the end of the question. This phenomenon is commonly known as the "high rising terminal" or simply HRT, and is becoming increasingly common around the world. While most people speak like this when they are uncomfortable with the statement they are making, some people just have this as their normal speech. With this becoming more and more common, we may have to adjust the way we distinguish between different types of statements because we no longer have those unintentional cues we are all so used to hearing in our everyday speech. To me, this seemed like such an awkward conversation (seeing as he was almost yelling the whole time), and I had to pay much closer attention to what this man was saying just to pick up on simple things like if he was asking me a question or just saying a simple statement.