She sells seashells by the seashore

[sumonasumonakha.t]

Fascinating and often challenging verbal workouts, tongue twisters are features of many languages.

Tongue twisters
Tongue twisters certainly raise smiles when the unfortunate souls reciting them run into trouble. They can also be written to include witticisms or to inevitably result in vulgarity.

These verbal gymnastics are usually entertaining but can be extremely useful too. It’s worth familiarising yourself with a few tongue twisters as they just might come in handy.

What is a tongue twister?
A tongue twister is a phrase or verse that is deliberately designed to be difficult to articulate. Speakers need to concentrate if they are to express these phrases correctly and the faster the speaker attempts to recite a tongue twister, the more likely they are to stumble over the words.


Tongue twisters explained
Tongue twisters rely on various linguistic features to produce phrases that mess with minds as well as tongues:

Many tongue twisters work their magic by featuring rapid alternations between similar but distinct phonemes. Phonemes are distinct units of sound in a specified language.

Example:



Some tongue twisters rely on a combination of alliteration and rhyme, and feature sequences of guatemala mobile database sounds that require the speaker to reposition their tongue between syllables. The same sounds are often repeated in different sequences.

Example:

Tongue twisters 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

Tongue twisters sometimes utilise compound words and their stems to cause verbal and mental confusion.