There are many different ways to accentuate the positive.
We continue the guided tour of world languages with forty (plus) ways of expressing ‘yes’. As with its counterpart, the essential, and toddler-beloved ‘No!’, we will observe that the words for ‘yes’ exhibit a great deal of similarity within language families. As a general rule, when any given word is similar between two languages, it either reflects shared descent from a common ‘ancestor’ language—which happens more often in the case of core vocabulary words like ‘yes’ or ‘no’—or it reflects the borrowing in recent times of words that previously hadn’t existed, as in slang (cool, OK) and technology (internet, iPad). ‘Yes’ fits in the first of those categories: Since the dawn of human communication, and well before we have any records to tell us what words they used, people have surely needed to signal agreement. These may be the only two concepts that can be expressed nonverbally in every culture by head movement alone—if you don’t believe that, just try signaling ‘I dunno’ without your shoulders moving. See what I mean?
However…there are two points about ‘yes’ that contrast with ‘no’. First: There’s even more sonic variety among these words, even within related families such as our own1 Indo-European languages. Nearly all Indo-European negations start with the ‘N’ sound; affirmations are a little more all over the map. Second: Not only are the words different (as we’d expect between different language families)… but even the concept of ‘Yes’ can vary. Does it mean to affirm? To agree? To encourage? Or some combination of the above? In some languages, for instance, ‘Yes’ means ‘I intend a positive meaning, regardless of how you phrased the question.’ English is an example of this category. In others, ‘Yes’ means, ‘I confirm that the previous statement is correct’—Japanese being an example. To be specific: Responding to the comment “I don’t look fat in these jeans?” a Japanese speaker can say “Hai” (Yes = that’s correct, you don’t) while an English speaker better think very hard before using “Yes” to start that sentence. In yet other languages, ‘Yes’ is not even a fixed word; in Chinese and Irish (otherwise very different languages from each other) one usually expresses ‘yes’ by repeating whichever verb was most recently used. Can that be confusing? …well, yes.
Now having said that ‘yes’ words are less uniform than ‘no’, within branches of the Indo-European family there are still a number of sound similarities. In the Germanic cluster of languages, the initial “Y” sound predominates, though it’s spelled variably with either Y or J. The most common version is ‘ja’, which is the affirmative in German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages; English-speakers would pronounce this as ‘ya’. Norwegian and Swedish versions of ‘ja’ are pronounced slightly differently; the latter is a bit more like ‘yaw’ (which I find funnier, maybe because it reminds me of Valley-speak. Sorry, Sweden.) Other ‘ja/ya’ languages include Afrikaans and Yiddish, due to their common roots with Dutch and German, respectively. (Despite these roots, Yiddish is traditionally written right-to-left using the Hebrew alphabet.)
While the Romance languages are also familiar to many, and several of them share quite similar words for ‘yes’—Portuguese ‘sim’, Spanish ‘sí ’, Italian ‘sì ’ (the accent marks flip but the pronunciation doesn’t)—others are distinct. The French say ‘oui’ (but of course…),while Romanians say ‘da’ and speakers of Romansh say ‘gea’ (or at least some do; this fourth official language of Switzerland has so few speakers that not all necessarily agree.) Why such variation? To uncover the reasons, let’s go back to Latin, the great-grandmother of the Romance family. While the ancient Romans expressed the negative uniformly with N-words (‘no’, ‘non’), there was no one word that precisely meant ‘yes’ as we know it today. Latin could affirm in a variety of creative ways, including:
- Sic (“thus”)
- Ita est (“so it is”)
- Ita vero (“truly so”)
- Certe (“certainly”)
- Etiam (“and also”, “indeed”)
Of these choices (and there are even more!), the first one (‘sic’) developed over time into the versions of ‘si’ used throughout the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. So far so good. But what about the other members of the Romance family? Well, since there were so many ways to express ‘yes’, in some parts of the former Roman empire the preferred affirmatives were the Latin words ‘hoc ille’ (meaning ‘this-he’), or just ‘hoc’ (meaning ‘this’, as in ‘ad hoc’). As often happens, the former term shed letters over the centuries, becoming first ‘o-il’, then eventually the modern French ‘oui’ that we all know and love. The latter term lives on as ‘yes’ (‘òc’), in the Occitan language of southern France—in which the word is so uniquely important that the entire language was named after it, plus a former province (Languedoc) in which it was spoken. Such is the power of yes!
Within the Slavic branch of the Indo-European family, Russian affirms with the word ‘da’, which it shares with Bulgarian and the languages of the former Yugoslavia (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and others.) Polish and Ukrainian, meanwhile, both use ‘tak’; closely related words often differ in pronunciation by having a ‘voiced’ consonant (like D, B, or G) in one language and its ‘unvoiced’ counterpart (T, P, or K) in another. Czech is a bit of an outlier, and potentially confusing to many non-Czech speakers, with ‘ano’ meaning ‘yes’. On the other hand, terms in some other languages exhibit the effects of borrowing from geographically adjacent, but not closely related tongues: Romanians speak a Romance language (thus their country’s name), but have adopted the word ‘da’ for ‘yes’; meanwhile Latvian, which is closer on the family tree to Slavic, uses the nearly Dutch-sounding ‘jā’ and ‘nē’ for yes and no. That’s a fun thing about languages: they give and take from each other, and it’s hard to predict when they will or won’t.
Somewhat like ancient Latin, and as referenced above, the Irish language (also known as Irish Gaelic) is more flexible about the way it says yes. Rather than using a fixed word, Irish speakers tend to repeat the verb in the previous question: ‘sea’ (pronounced ‘shah’, as in the name Sean without the N) is a short version of ‘it’s that’, while ‘tá’ is akin to ‘there is’. Other branches of the Indo-European tree have equally distinct ways of expressing the affirmative. The Greek word for yes is often written (in the Roman alphabet) as ‘nai’, but is pronounced more like ‘nay’—again confusing, because it sounds (to most non-Greek speakers) like it ought to mean its opposite. And unsurprisingly, the languages of Europe that don’t belong to the Indo-European family also have distinct words for yes. In Hungarian, though the word for ‘no’ sounds familiar (‘nem’), its opposite is ‘igen’. Meanwhile, in the famously unique Basque language, the word for ‘yes’ is ‘bai’. Thus an English-speaking visitor to Basque Country might incorrectly think they were being told to go away upon hearing “Bai bai”—except that, in all likelihood, the conversation would be happening in Spanish instead.
Moving towards Asia, in Turkish ‘evet’ means ‘yes’; while the corresponding terms in Arabic and Hebrew are ‘na’am’ (or ‘naem’) and ‘khen’, respectively. The latter two language belong to the same Semitic language family, and share similarities in both writing (from right to left) as well as grammar and word construction (consonants tend to stay the same; vowels change along with meaning).
Returning to the Indo-European language family, in Persian (or Farsi), the standard word for yes is ‘baleh’, similarly to its cousin language Kurdish. In nearby northern India and Pakistan, yes-words bear close resemblance to each other: speakers of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Bengali and Punjabi all affirm with variations on ‘haa’ (with or without a final ‘N’ or ‘M’ that’s sort of pronounced lightly through the nose—like the French ‘bon’). The languages of southern India belong to the completely distinct Dravidian family, and each has a distinct word for ‘yes’. The Tamil word ‘ām’ and the Kannada word ‘haudu’ sound just a bit like their north Indian counterparts (though on the back and front ends, respectively), while the Telugu ‘avunu’ and Malayalam ‘athe’ are entirely different. But beyond the variety in sound, South Asian languages express their individual flair even more vividly through their insistence on nearly each one having its own writing system. (Western high schoolers: Be thankful that Spanish, French and German don’t all have completely different alphabets.) But what these languages might lose in ease of learning, they make up for in the (exuberant) beauty of their scripts:
In Africa, the north of the continent speaks Arabic and other languages of the Afroasiatic family, which also includes Berber, Amharic, Somali, even Ancient Egyptian—making it the surviving language family with the longest history of writing. In contrast, the rest of Africa is dominated by the prolific Niger-Congo family. Yoruba speakers, concentrated in Nigeria and nearby, say ‘bẹẹni’ (also written ‘bẹ́ẹ̀ni’) for ‘yes’. The accents indicate three different tones, which can change the meaning if not used properly—similarly to spoken Chinese. In Swahili, spoken mostly in East Africa, the affirmative is ‘ndiyo’, while in the Zulu language of South Africa it is ‘yebo’. Both Swahili and Zulu belong to the large sub-family of Bantu languages; the term ‘Bantu’ itself comes from the Zulu ‘abantu’ which means ‘the people’. More than a few languages throughout the world name themselves in just such a manner, as we will see below.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese each belong to different and unique language families—in contrast with the raucous, far-ranging Indo-European family, each of these represents a smaller, more homogeneous household, if you will. As we saw for the word ‘no’, each East Asian language has its own distinct way of saying ‘yes’, despite the heavy influence of Chinese (the Big Brother of Asia) over the centuries. Which brings us back to the flexible Chinese concept of yes:
‘Shì ’ is the most common translation you will find for the word ‘yes’—the back-slanting mark is a tone marker, indicating that tone of voice falls from high to low, as an English speaker might use to end a sentence. But it’s not precisely the same as ‘yes’: literally, ‘shì ’ is the verb ‘to be’. (The compound written character consists of the pictograph for ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ below that for ‘sun’, as in: ‘All is correct under the sun’?) Furthermore, since verb conjugations don’t exist in Chinese—and thank goodness there’s something easy about Chinese!—‘shì ’ also means ‘(it) is, (I) am, (you) are’, et cetera. So ‘shì ’ only properly means yes depending on how the question was stated. (See also: Latin, Irish.) In other situations, the best way to respond affirmatively may be “Duì” (dway), which means ‘right/correct’. But more often, a Chinese speaker will repeat the key verb: for example, the correct response to:
- “Nǐ hái yào yīgè chāshāo bāo ma?” = “Do you want another roast pork bun?”
would be:
- “Yào.” = “Want.”
Note that I didn’t say the correct positive response; in this case, no reasonable person would turn down a chashao bao if offered. I’m getting hungry just thinking about this hypothetical sentence.
Japanese and Korean work a little more conventionally. Japanese say ‘hai’; written with a phonetic syllable-based alphabet, thus:
An important distinction in Japanese is that ‘hai’ generally has the sense of “Yes, I affirm that what you just said is correct.” So be careful if the question is negative: if the question is “You don’t want any more sashimi?” then the response “Hai” means, “That’s correct—I don’t.” This, of course, might tragically deprive you of more raw tuna, which it would be unreasonable not to want. (See “chaoshao bao”.)
Like Japan, Korea also has its own home-grown writing system, known as Hangul. This has letters for vowels and consonants which cluster together in each syllable. In both the words below, the long vertical lines on the right constitute the vowels, while the left-most letter is ‘silent’ in the first word, and a consonant (N) in the second. However, it may be confusing (at least to those of us who speak “Y vs. N” languages) that “yae” and “nae” sound like opposites—they are nearly dead ringers for the English “Yea!” and “Nay!”, for goodness’ sake. (See also: Greek.) But both words mean ‘yes’.
In Vietnamese ‘yes’ is again distinct from other Asian languages, and there’s more than one version. ‘Vâng’ or ‘có ’ seem to be the most commonly cited, but there are more: Vietnamese is very relationally specific, and the proper way to say yes likely depends on who you’re talking to and how old they are. (Please feel free to share comments if you’re a speaker of Vietnamese, or for that matter, any language!) Moving toward the Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian) languages, in Malay (spoken in both Malaysia and Indonesia) the word for ‘yes’ is ‘ya’. Aha! you might think, that sounds familiar… but the similarity is probably coincidental. Malay has borrowed many words in earlier centuries from Persian, Arabic, and Tamil (due to trade and Islam), plus European languages more recently (due to trade, colonization, and the Internet)—but basic words like ‘yes’ don’t tend to borrow so easily.
Multiple tongues are spoken in the Philippines; speakers of both Tagalog (the most widespread, also known as Filipino) and Cebuano say ‘oo’ (not as in “Oooh… Ice cream!” but instead more like “Ohhh… shucks, I wanted ice cream.”) The Polynesian languages, which are cousins to Malay and Filipino, all seem to favor vowel-only words for ‘yes’: In Māori the word is ‘ae’, nearly the same as Tahitian and Hawaiian, while Tongan uses ‘ ’io’ and Samoans ‘ioe’ (these five Polynesian languages have the largest number of speakers.) So within the Malayo-Polynesian family there seems to be greater conservation of sounds between the words for ‘yes’ than the words for ‘no’, which is the opposite of the Indo-European family. Could this possibly reflect some difference in fundamental life outlook—for instance, the positivity of one culture (in which the majority of people lived within minutes of a South Pacific beach) versus the negativity of another (in which they, well, didn’t)? Words change over time for all kinds of reasons, so any such explanation is purely speculative. Though fun to think about.
North America’s Inuit people, who inhabit arctic and sub-arctic zones (and in whose Inuktitut language Inuit also means ‘the people’—see Bantu) also have an all-vowel ‘yes’: ‘ii’, which can be written officially either with Roman letters or Syllabics:
In syllabic writing, a dot above the syllable makes that distinction—so in the word above, the triangle represents the ‘i’ sound (as in ‘Oui’ or ‘Merci’), and the dot makes the vowel twice as long. In Roman script, the lengthening is conveyed by doubling the vowel. This distinction between short and long vowels is important in the Inuktitut languages: For instance, ‘inuk’ means one person, while ‘inuuk’ with a long U represents two people; the plural ‘inuit’ only comes into play when there are three or more people. Which makes me think of the old saw about two being company and three a crowd—for the Inuit the concept is baked into the language. (Incidentally, parents of teenage girls may be either amused, or anxious, to learn that the word for daughter is ‘panik’; two daughters give you, literally, ‘paniik’. But I digress.)
In the Navajo or Diné language (Diné again means ‘the people’—see both Inuktitut and Bantu), the word for ‘yes’ is ‘aoo’ ’. The apostrophe after the second ‘O’ (not to be confused with the closing quotation mark) represents the glottal stop—an example in English being the pause between syllables in “Uh-oh.” Not only is the glottal stop considered a letter in Navajo (and other languages besides), but it’s actually the most commonly occurring consonant sound; in fact the word for ‘yes’ actually both starts and ends with one, but the first one is not always written. In the Nahuatl language of Mexico (specifically, Eastern Huasteca) the affirmative is ‘quena’ (pronounced ‘kena’, as if spelled in Spanish). Proceeding further south to the Yucatan Peninsula, speakers of Yucatec Maya say ‘jaaj’—to pronounce this correctly, think of the Spanish pronunciation of J: it sounds sort of like “Hah!” and should not at all rhyme with “Dodge”. In the Quechua language of the Andes, yes is ‘arí ’.
Finally, this list ends with more than a word. As for other sign languages throughout the globe, American Sign Language (also used widely in Anglophone Canada) communicates ideas from signer to viewer, or receiver, by using signs that encompass handshapes, movement, and sometimes other bodily cues. In ASL ‘yes’ can be communicated by a nod of the head—a signal easily understood by hearing people as well—but the formal sign for ‘yes’ consists of a fist made with the signer’s dominant hand, shaken up and down at the wrist like a nodding head:
[from: Valli, Clayton, Ed. The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language, 2005]
So there you have it. Thanks for joining me in a whirlwind tour through the many varieties of ‘yes’. In the following posts… we will meet the parents.
Notes:
1 Not to be Indo-European-centric or anything. I use the term ‘our own’ because if you’re reading this without translation software, then English is your language too.