Deaf people can’t hear, but trough learning they are able to speak(talk), in an understandable way.
Do the way deaf people speak have a name(no, not language sign, when they talk)?
Is this even possible in Mandarin/Cantonese? Because mimicking the tones witouth a proper understanding of sound seems really hard.
Regards.
In: Biology
Mandarin and other Chinese languages are indeed tonal, but they are also heavily contextual. Even if the tones are somewhat off in conversation, conversation participants can still follow due to context.
Yes, they can speak in tonal languages, with about as much difficulty as a non-tonal language.
It’s a challenging, but not impossible.
The different tones in Mandarin involve you doing some different things with how the words come out of your lung.
Even without hearing the sounds you can definitely feel the difference in what your body is doing.
For example, the forth tone feels like you’re making that word quick and sharp.
You can teach someone to feel how the sound is coming out, instead of hearing it.
There is actually a [Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Sign_Language), [Taiwanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Sign_Language), and [Hong Kong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Sign_Language) sign language! CSL uses an alphabetic [fingerspelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspelling) for pinyin, so it doesn’t need tones, because you’re essentially “signing the written language.”
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