# Can loudness of speech sounds influence meaning? Tags: phonology, phonemes, minimal-pairs - Score: 16 - Views: 2794 - Answers: 3 - Answered: yes - Asked by: GA1 (1237 rep) - Asked: 2020-02-18 - Edited: 2020-10-20 - Site: linguistics ## Question In Chinese, words can have different meanings if their tones are changed, e.g. 是 (shì) and 十 (shí). In Italian, words can have different meanings if a consonant is geminated, e.g. sete and sette. My question is: is there any language whose words can have different meanings based only on the loudness of the utterance? If so, please provide examples. ## Answers ### Answer by WavesWashSands (score: 11) Intensity is the physical correlate of loudness, and is also a correlate of stress in some languages. Moreover, stress can create differences in meaning in some languages (e.g. PRO-test vs. pro-TEST); we say that such languages have lexical stress, or that stress is lexically distinctive. It follows that if we can find a language where intensity is a good correlate of stress, and stress is lexically distinctive, that would answer your question. One example is Papiamentu (Remijsen and van Heuven, 2005), and I'm sure there are others. No