Tongue-twister


A tongue-twister
is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken word game. Some tongue-twisters produce results that are humorous when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value.

Types of tongue-twisters

Tongue-twisters may rely on rapid alternation between similar but distinct phonemes, combining two different alternation patterns, familiar constructs in loanwords, or other features of a spoken language in order to be difficult to articulate. For example, the following sentence was claimed as "the most difficult of common English-language tongue-twisters" by William Poundstone.

The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.

These deliberately difficult expressions were popular in the 19th century. The popular "she sells seashells" tongue twister was originally published in 1850 as a diction exercise. The term tongue twister was first applied to this kind of expressions in 1895.
"She sells seashells" was turned into a popular song in 1908, with words by British songwriter Terry Sullivan and music by Harry Gifford. According to folk etymology, it was said to be inspired by the life and work of Mary Anning, an early fossil collector. However, Winick was unable to find direct evidence that Anning inspired the tongue-twister nor that Sullivan was aware of this.

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.

The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure.

For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore

Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.

The most famous tongue twister is Peter Piper

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked

Many tongue-twisters use a combination of alliteration and rhyme. They have two or more sequences of sounds that require repositioning the tongue between syllables, then the same sounds are repeated in a different sequence. An example of this is the song Betty Botter :

Betty Botter bought a bit of butter.

The butter Betty Botter bought was a bit bitter

And made her batter bitter.

But a bit of better butter makes better batter.

So Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter

Making Betty Botter's bitter batter better

There are also twisters that make use of compound words and their stems, for example:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck

if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck

if a woodchuck would chuck wood.

The catch a lot tongue twister is a great example of what anyone can think of when doing daily activities.

My friend Catchalot in his Cachalot,

Would Catch a lot of other Catchalots,

In their Cachalots,

Who would catch a lot,

Of Cachalots!

The following twister won the "grand prize" in a contest in Games Magazine in 1979:

Shep Schwab shopped at Scott's Schnapps shop;

One shot of Scott's Schnapps stopped Schwab's watch.

Some tongue-twisters take the form of words or short phrases which become tongue-twisters when repeated rapidly. Some examples include:


Old Mother Hunt had a rough cut punt

Not a punt cut rough,

But a rough cut punt.

In 2013, a psychologist at an Acoustical Society of America conference claimed that “Pad kid poured curd pulled cod" is the trickiest twister to date.

Related concepts

Shibboleths

s, that is, phrases in a language that are difficult for someone who is not a native speaker of that language to say might be regarded as a type of tongue-twist. An example is Georgian baq'aq'i ts'q'alshi q'iq'inebs, in which q' is a uvular ejective. Another example, the Czech and Slovak strč prst skrz krk is difficult for a non-native speaker due to the absence of vowels, although syllabic r is a common sound in Czech, Slovak and some other Slavic languages.

Finger-fumblers

The sign language equivalent of a tongue twister is called a finger-fumbler. According to Susan Fischer, the phrase Good blood, bad blood is a tongue-twister in English as well as a finger-fumbler in ASL.

One-syllable article

is a form of Mandarin Chinese tongue twister, written in Classical Chinese. Due to Mandarin Chinese having only four tonal ranges, these works sound like a work of one syllable in different tonal range when spoken in Mandarin, but are far more comprehensible when spoken in another dialect.

Tongue-twisters in creative works