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All languages in the world that I know of use words with more than one syllable. Are there any where all words have strictly one syllable? That would mean that there is just one vocal cluster per word, be it a single vowel (short or long) or a diphthong.

I have read that Chinese or Vietnamese has polysyllabic words even though morphemes are monosyllabic. That would be the closest I have found. Are there any real monosyllabic languages out there?

As @leoboiko explains below, the number of possible syllables would need to be quite high to support a sizeable vocabulary. But it is not unfeasible to combine e.g. 30 consonants 'C' with 9 vowels 'V' with 5 semi-consonants S, to yield 30 x 5 x 9 x 5 x 30 ~ 200k possible combinations with the structure CSVSC. Adding some tones like in SE languages would give us even more possibilities. The question is, does this happen in practice?

alexfernandez
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The official Chinese language isn't "supposed to" be monosyllabic, at all. That's a misconception. Chinese languages are polysyllabic and that's it, including the putonghua standard (the pīnyīn orthographic standard, for example, includes rules to space the letters by polysyllabic words).

The confusion arises because Chinese morphemes are usually monosyllabic, so that most (not all!) syllables are also morphemes (source: Packard, The Morphology of Chinese). This feature is reflected in the traditional writing system, which is syllabic, and thus lends an impression of "monosyllabism". But morphemes are not words, and syllables being morphemes isn't the same as the language being monosyllabic.

In the past, some people (Karlgren) have argued that Chinese used to be monosyllabic. According to this old hypothesis, the syllables used to be more complex, and were used as independent words; as the phonetic system simplified, they supposedly became too similar to one another, so that new, polysyllabic words had to be coined. However, in reality polysyllabic words occur throughout the historical record; they're not new at all (see: Mair, Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia, & forthcoming; and Dong, The Prosody and Morphology of Elastic Words in Chinese).

It's not hard to see why languages aren't monosyllabic. English has well over 100,000 words; so does my copy of the CEDICT Chinese dictionary. Even with tones and unusually complex syllables, the number of possible syllables hardly reaches the low-tens of thousands. So a language that was monosyllabic would have to deal with an unusually restricted vocabulary—and the words would sound confusingly similar to one another, to boot.

melissa_boiko
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  • Chinese has been put to rest; but what about Vietnamese? – user6726 Aug 14 '17 at 15:42
  • I'm not qualified to answer about Viet. The romanization seems to space by syllables; but, given the existence of specialized word segmentation tools – with an accuracy of 98%, suggesting that word segmentation isn't trivial even with word lists – I'm going to guess that words are bigger than syllables, too (that is, the entries in that list probably aren't just sequences of words, but unitary words including bound morphemes). – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 15:57
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    Did Karlgren ever actually argue that Chinese used to be entirely monosyllabic? It is certainly true that it used to be more monosyllabic than it is now; that is, the ratio of polysyllabics to monosyllabics has risen. And of course, the trouble with defining whether a language is monosyllabic or not is the ever-present niggle of what constitutes a word. Even modern Mandarin is still largely monosyllabic in the sense that the vast majority of morphemes are words; most polysyllabic words are just compounds and thus countable as separate words. Otherwise, if compounds are counted as → – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 14 '17 at 17:40
  • → single words, then there are definitely no purely monosyllabic languages in the world. I refuse to believe that any language has a one-syllable word for ‘Danube steamship company captain’ or ‘head district chimney sweep’, for instance. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 14 '17 at 17:40
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: See Dong (above) for argument/data that Middle Chinese, at least, wasn't more monosyllabic than modern Mandarin. Old Chinese perhaps was; but Mair, Kennedy and others have shown that past Sinologists overlooked many poly words in classical sources. This is compounded by the fact that Chinese is "elastic" (see Dong, and also work by Duanmu), and Classical Chinese is maximally "compressed", so one has to know where to look to interpret it, and it may not be very indicative of spoken OC (I understand this is an ongoing argument). – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 17:56
  • (compare the case of Japanese, where written Japanese normally uses double as many Sinitic words as spoken J. Sinitic J words are especially concise, but also especially homophonic; written J relies to some extent on Chinese characters to clarify them. if one were to judge spoken modern J from written J, one would get the wrong rates of homophony/word-length. the same is argued about Classical Chinese, that it was a special register relying to some extent on the written support. evidence about this includes "vernacular" poly words that pop up even in the oldest records.) – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 18:01
  • DeFrancis, in The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy has an argument (with data) against he notion that Mandarin is more monosyllabic than, say, English. Identifying words is tricky business, but there's been a lot of discussion on that, and by now the rules for what's a 词 cí are agreed-upon enough to be standard (in pīnyīn orth. etc.). The definition of "word" is language-specific, but common criteria include phonetics (word-level accent, sandhi, vowel harmony etc.); morphosyntax (inflections, bound affixes); and semantics (an unanalyzable compound needs its own lexical entry). – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 18:03
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    I agree completely that Mandarin is no more monosyllabic than English. The trouble arises when you try to quantify the actual difference between a ‘word’ and a compound. Is 花儿 a word? Definitely. Is it a compound? Hardly. Is 电话 a word? Sure. Is it a compound? I’d say yes. Is 素食主义者 a word? Well… maybe. Or maybe not. Is it a compound? Definitely. Is 中国共产党委员会宣传部 a word? No, that would be stretching it. Is it a compound? Absolutely. The majority of polysyllabics here can be counted as compounds; some also as single words. That is not true of English, which was the difference I was highlighting. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 14 '17 at 18:12
  • @JanusBahsJacquet The argument against that (that Mandarin is different than English in having more word-word comps.) won't fit this comment space, but it's pretty interesting, so I recommend taking a look at DeFrancis' book. I agree that Mandarin is different from English in that it has much more meaningful syllables – that is, syllables that are morphemes. But bound morphemes are not words; and words built with the same bound morphemes (togetherness, fairness…) are different words. If you consider that and do the math, you find out the rates for M. are surprisingly close to Eng. – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 18:20
  • Bound morphemes are not words, no; but (at least experientially) Mandarin has a much higher rate of syllables that are not only morphemes, but actual words—that is, unbound morphemes. The vast majority of polysyllabic words in English can be separated into separate mono- (or di)syllabic morphemes; but most such words will contain at least one bound morpheme. The rate of unbound-only words (i.e., sampling fairness, troublesome, and motorway yields a 33.3% ratio) ‘feels’ higher in Mandarin than in English. (I believe I did read some of DeFrancis’ book once… no longer have it.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 14 '17 at 18:34
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – melissa_boiko Aug 14 '17 at 18:48
  • @leoboiko The number of words in English may be high, but I think that the number of possible syllables may be quite high too. A language with 30 consonants and 9 vowels would have 8100 possible CVC syllables; adding consonant clusters, dyphthongs and e.g. 6 tones might yield hundreds of thousands of possibilities. So it is conceivable, but does something like this exist? – alexfernandez Aug 14 '17 at 21:15
  • @leoboiko I updated the question with a reference to your comment, thanks! – alexfernandez Aug 14 '17 at 21:27
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Replying to this old thread, as someone who is Vietnamese, for island we use one word đảo. And yes grasshopper is one of those words we duplicate a word but it's hardly important – it's like saying "it's really red red". Grasshopper is essentially 'scratch scratch'.

I'd agree Vietnamese is monosyllabic and it's actually a feature I thought other languages must of had which is how I found this thread.

Ann
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In my point of view, Chinese and maybe Vietnamese and Thai are really monosyllabic. But big part of words are compound words of two or three monosyllabic words. Like pinyin "duibuqi", "sorry", is a compound word composed of three monosyllabic words, dui, bu and qi. These "really", "not" and "up" monosyllabic words together form a compound word, "duibuqi".

But all these separate monosyllabic words are used also independently as separate words, both alone and in other compound words.

My mother language is Finnish, and in Finland there is an obsession to "write words together", forming extremely long compound words. Making Finnish difficult to read and learn for non Finnish speakers.

Be Brave Be Like Ukraine
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Mikko Aalto
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Vietnamese is monosyllabic, at least according to some teachers of Vietnamese to non-Viet speakers.

Cadmus_124
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