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Tone is rather difficult to convey over text, unless writing dialogue where you can write ‘Person said angrily’. Unless careful with chosen message phrasing and choice of diction, it is very easy for the wrong emotion to be conveyed. In speech, intonation is a major part of effective conversation.

Multiple attempts have been made at addressing this issue. Most interesting in my opinion is assorted new punctuation. For example, the ‘snigger point’ or ‘note of cachinnation’ (◡) to be used for indicating ironic sentences or clauses, the SarcMark™ as a sarcasm full stop alternate, or the upside down exclamation point (¡) as another sarcasm indicator. Other similar attempts at new punctuation include the percontation point (⸮) for rhetorical questions or the interrobang (‽) as a combination of a question and exclamation mark.

However, much more commonly applied in actual communication are tone indicators. There are a great very many, but the ones which see frequent and common usage are:

They’re used by appending the indicator to the end of the message, like so: ‘Nice face /s’. They originate from HTML-style presentations (<sarcasm>Nice face</sarcasm>), but over time people dropped the angle brackets and opening indicator while shortening the indicator’s name to what we have today.

There are quite a few tells that people use in online messaging which can be used to identify a user’s culture or place of origin. Beyond the obvious sentence patterns, word usage, and other language behaviours, there are some small behaviours that can be used to identify groups:

• In Russia it is common to end messages with ) or ( to indicate expression. This comes from emoticons such as :), but colons can be hard to type on Cyrillic keyboards, so they just became opening and closing brackets. ) generally represents a smiley expression, while ( generally represents a sad expression. Multiple brackets are sometimes used to convey a stronger form of the emotion.

• ‘XD’ is a commonly used Polish emoticon. Different capitalisations and the number of xs and ds influence the meaning. It was adopted from the West’s usage as an expression akin to 😆 when Poland properly embraced the internet in the 2000s, but unlike in the West it didn’t slide out of fashion and adopted more general, varied usage among Poles. Sometimes it is also used as a noun.

• Japan frequently uses kaomoji. For example: (^_^) and (づ ◕‿◕ )づ. Their textual construction allows a great variety to be constructed and for them to be easily altered based on context, unlike emoji.

• In Brazilian Portuguese, ‘kkkkk’ and ‘ksksks’ are commonly used to express laughter. ‘rsrsrs’ is also used as a shortening of ‘risos’, meaning ‘laughter’.

• Inverted punctuation (¿ or ¡) is commonly used by Spanish speakers, even when writing English.

• In Thai, the number 5 is pronounced ‘hâaห้า’, so Thai speakers will often write ‘5’ to indicate laughter, with more 5s increasing the intensity: ’555555’.

• French uses a space before some punctuation, which French speakers will often bring across into English: ‘How are you ?’.

• In some Nordic cultures, most notably Sweden, it is common to use a double caret (^^) to indicate a smile or nod. It is roughly equivalent to the 😊 emoji, though is used more casually. It is also used as a shorthand of the (^_^) kaomoji more generally across the world.

The use of ‘he/she’ really annoys me.

‘They’ is much more inclusive than ‘he/she’ and is also quicker to both say and write. Anyone using ‘he/she’ today is either forced to by some obtuse requirements, or is purposefully being bigoted.

‘(s)he’ is no better and is just as needlessly difficult. Also, it is always ‘he/she’, never ‘she/he’. ‘(s)he’ literally demotes the feminine pronoun with parenthesis.

Don’t get me started on cases where an entire document is written with masculine pronouns as ‘default’.

A far from perfect little table, but one that hopefully gets the point across and works as a reference. Scripts ≠ languages, with many scripts being used by many languages.

Japanese is full of 外gai来rai語go (loanwords), especially from English. A lot of these words end up sounding like English terms with a Japanese accent.

For example, ‘table’ translates to テtēーーブbuルru. The reason for the pronunciation change is that Japanese has a strict moraic structure where most consonants must be followed by a vowel, which here introduces a ‘u’ (though in most dialects it is a devocalised vowel). Additionally, Japanese has a single liquid phoneme, rather than distinct /r/ and /l/ sounds, so the English /l/ sound becomes a Japanese /r/ sound. Thus, テtēーーブbuルru.

Some people misinterpret adoption of a Japanese accent for pronunciation as insensitive, but the language’s phonetic structure necessitates use of Japanese phonology. Words adopted into Japanese are transcribed into Katakana – the original versions are incorrect in Japanese. Using the native Japanese rhythm ensures the word is recognisable and flows naturally within the sentence.

Chinese pronunciations are not intuitive for English speakers. The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, also known as Hanyu Pinyin or just pīnyīn, is a romanised version of Chinese that uses Latin letters in ways that don’t match typical English usage.

This cheat sheet is not comprehensive but does cover the basics and many common pitfalls.

Consonants

The primary hurdle is the distinction between the J, Q, X sounds (tongue forward/down) and the Zh, Ch, Sh sounds (tongue curled back).

Vowels & Combinations

Pinyin vowels often change their sound based on the consonants they follow.

Common Pitfalls

• The Hidden ‘ü’: When the ü sound follows J, Q, X, or Y, the umlaut is dropped. Even if written as Ju, it is pronounced like Jü.
• The ‘ui’ Shortcut: Pinyin -ui is shorthand for -uei. Therefore, Hui sounds more like ‘Hway’ than ‘Hoo-ee’.
• Unvoiced Consonants: In Pinyin, B, D, and G are ‘unvoiced’. This means B sounds closer to a soft English P, and D sounds closer to a soft English T.

The Four Tones

1. First (mā): High and level (like a sustained singing note).
2. Second (má): Rising (like a question: ‘What?’).
3. Third (mǎ): Low and dipping (like a slow, hesitant ‘Well…’).
4. Fourth (mà): Sharp and falling (like a firm command: ‘Stop!’).