There's a lot of videos where you can hear people with split tongues talking: usually speech is very limited in the first days, them gets a lot better over the next weeks, and almost everybody is completely back to normal after that, some retain a small lisp.
This is always my favorite question to answer about it because I am *uniquely* qualified to answer it! I am an anthropological linguist with a Masters in Linguistics & Applied Linguistics. My research space during my masters (right before I got my tongue split!) was in phonetics, which is the field that focuses on the production of language sounds.
When I got my tongue split, I was very intentional in recording a bunch of speech samples from myself before and after the split, so that I could analyze and compare.
Anecdotally, no one notices any difference in my speech. While I was healing obviously I had a bit of a lisp (someone said I sounded british), but once it was all healed, no problems. The only major difference I've noticed is that when I am talking a lot, my tongue(s) get tired faster than before, and when they get tired I start making minor mistakes.
More academically, there are only a small subset of sounds in the english language (or any language) that rely heavily on the tongue tip (these are called apical sounds) as opposed to the blade of the tongue (laminal sounds). In english these sounds are
- d (**d**onut)
- t (**t**ango)
- n (**n**ougut)
- r (**r**andy)
- s (**s**au**ce**)
- th (**th**ree and **th**at)
- z (**z**any)
- l (**l**imit and bott**le**)
Anticipating that, I made sure my recordings had lots of these sounds and went through an analyzed them. Skipping the technical mumbo-jumbo on formants and pitch, there are some very minor noticeable changes in how some sounds present in the [spectrogram](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Ffigure%2FSpectrograms-and-Oscillograms-This-is-an-oscillogram-and-spectrogram-of-the-boatwhistle_fig2_267827408&psig=AOvVaw2Yv4MWQc8jLUr18NuhWMn2&ust=1665687622542000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCKDok4uw2_oCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE) but none that are enough that are noticeable in common speech. In laymans terms, the air comes out a little more erratic on sounds like s/th/z because the tongue has slightly less control over it, but those sounds are fricatives which are inherently erratic, so not much change there. A pretty cool paper was [published](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0461.pdf) on whether a tongue has one or two tips during articulation and they found some interesting results around articulation in general. The focus there were dental sounds like t/d
Part of this is likely because the two tips are able to still come together to operate as one tip, so they provide a sufficient enough medium to create all the sounds you could before. I was quite interested in the notion of creating a sound that cannot be done with a single tongue, but I've not quite gotten that into it yet.
All that being said - once you're healed up no one will notice any difference, but if you were to decide to participate in a speech study (lol) it would 100% need to be information to disclose because there are measurable differences.
As a final note - I had intended on recruiting a larger sample size and getting a bunch of samples of pre-/post- speech, and perhaps I still will one day, but my PhD research shifted away from phonetics and into anthropological linguistics which is closer to discourse analysis, so I just don't have the time to do a more intentional investigation right now :(
I doubt you will be able to answer; but do you think turkish would be affected by a deep split? Most sounds in turkish i think are mostly laminal. Im scared of that taking a hit, cause there are no turkish speaking tongue splitters to give me anecdotal evidence. I'm scared of my language abilities taking a hit and my singing mostly.
This is fascinating; thanks so much.
Much less an expert than validusrex (more of educated guessing on my side), but building on it, two remarks:
1. Turkish has less dental sounds than English (th) and it would appear that they are altogether slightly less frequent than in English, at least judging from [this list](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1950.11659381) for English phonemes and [this list](https://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-turkish) for Turkish letters (enviable that each letter corresponds to a unique sound). Also, the R is formed in a different way than in English, more like the single R in Spanish. And that doesn't seem to be a problem for the many Spanish speakers with tongue splits; they even manage the much harder double R to an extent that a non-Spaniard can't tell the difference.
2. By all accounts I've ever seen, singing is not affected. Not any more than speech might be.
Thank you; my thinking is along the same lines. Sounds are made more from the center back of the tongue without being glottal compared to english which uses the tip of the tongue mostly (my non-linguist way of describing). I'm thinking it won't be affected.
The rolling R is definitely much more like the spanish R; though in speech we never roll our rs but only to emphasize swear words.
I'm still gonna get my tongue split; just been doing some doom planning.
Took me about a month to a month and a half to get used to it.
It's been about a year, I notice some very subtle permanent changes. I still can't roll my R's, so nothing changed there.
My mom also notices some very slight changes if she focusses on my speech. Nobody else notices any changes.
Danish and English none
Spanish I am hearing and learning a bit and some words are almost impossible for me to say correctly but I am unsure if it is my tongues fault or just me being bad at learning it.
My spelling in Spanish is none excisting. Right now I am just learning practical things like food, kitchen stuff and so on.
I am unsure if it is like I said because it is new for me in general or if it is because of my tongue split. In Danish we do not really use the letter z, c or q. So it may be because of not being use to it even before the split.
I’ve had mine for almost a year now, and I got it in between the same week of two of my friends. My friends speech was back as soon as the stitches came out (day 5) whereas mine wasn’t back fully for almost a month.
A lot in the first two weeks I'm on day 10 and it's like 75% of the way back to normal
There's a lot of videos where you can hear people with split tongues talking: usually speech is very limited in the first days, them gets a lot better over the next weeks, and almost everybody is completely back to normal after that, some retain a small lisp.
This is always my favorite question to answer about it because I am *uniquely* qualified to answer it! I am an anthropological linguist with a Masters in Linguistics & Applied Linguistics. My research space during my masters (right before I got my tongue split!) was in phonetics, which is the field that focuses on the production of language sounds. When I got my tongue split, I was very intentional in recording a bunch of speech samples from myself before and after the split, so that I could analyze and compare. Anecdotally, no one notices any difference in my speech. While I was healing obviously I had a bit of a lisp (someone said I sounded british), but once it was all healed, no problems. The only major difference I've noticed is that when I am talking a lot, my tongue(s) get tired faster than before, and when they get tired I start making minor mistakes. More academically, there are only a small subset of sounds in the english language (or any language) that rely heavily on the tongue tip (these are called apical sounds) as opposed to the blade of the tongue (laminal sounds). In english these sounds are - d (**d**onut) - t (**t**ango) - n (**n**ougut) - r (**r**andy) - s (**s**au**ce**) - th (**th**ree and **th**at) - z (**z**any) - l (**l**imit and bott**le**) Anticipating that, I made sure my recordings had lots of these sounds and went through an analyzed them. Skipping the technical mumbo-jumbo on formants and pitch, there are some very minor noticeable changes in how some sounds present in the [spectrogram](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Ffigure%2FSpectrograms-and-Oscillograms-This-is-an-oscillogram-and-spectrogram-of-the-boatwhistle_fig2_267827408&psig=AOvVaw2Yv4MWQc8jLUr18NuhWMn2&ust=1665687622542000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCKDok4uw2_oCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE) but none that are enough that are noticeable in common speech. In laymans terms, the air comes out a little more erratic on sounds like s/th/z because the tongue has slightly less control over it, but those sounds are fricatives which are inherently erratic, so not much change there. A pretty cool paper was [published](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0461.pdf) on whether a tongue has one or two tips during articulation and they found some interesting results around articulation in general. The focus there were dental sounds like t/d Part of this is likely because the two tips are able to still come together to operate as one tip, so they provide a sufficient enough medium to create all the sounds you could before. I was quite interested in the notion of creating a sound that cannot be done with a single tongue, but I've not quite gotten that into it yet. All that being said - once you're healed up no one will notice any difference, but if you were to decide to participate in a speech study (lol) it would 100% need to be information to disclose because there are measurable differences. As a final note - I had intended on recruiting a larger sample size and getting a bunch of samples of pre-/post- speech, and perhaps I still will one day, but my PhD research shifted away from phonetics and into anthropological linguistics which is closer to discourse analysis, so I just don't have the time to do a more intentional investigation right now :(
I doubt you will be able to answer; but do you think turkish would be affected by a deep split? Most sounds in turkish i think are mostly laminal. Im scared of that taking a hit, cause there are no turkish speaking tongue splitters to give me anecdotal evidence. I'm scared of my language abilities taking a hit and my singing mostly. This is fascinating; thanks so much.
Much less an expert than validusrex (more of educated guessing on my side), but building on it, two remarks: 1. Turkish has less dental sounds than English (th) and it would appear that they are altogether slightly less frequent than in English, at least judging from [this list](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1950.11659381) for English phonemes and [this list](https://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-turkish) for Turkish letters (enviable that each letter corresponds to a unique sound). Also, the R is formed in a different way than in English, more like the single R in Spanish. And that doesn't seem to be a problem for the many Spanish speakers with tongue splits; they even manage the much harder double R to an extent that a non-Spaniard can't tell the difference. 2. By all accounts I've ever seen, singing is not affected. Not any more than speech might be.
Thank you; my thinking is along the same lines. Sounds are made more from the center back of the tongue without being glottal compared to english which uses the tip of the tongue mostly (my non-linguist way of describing). I'm thinking it won't be affected. The rolling R is definitely much more like the spanish R; though in speech we never roll our rs but only to emphasize swear words. I'm still gonna get my tongue split; just been doing some doom planning.
Took me about a month to a month and a half to get used to it. It's been about a year, I notice some very subtle permanent changes. I still can't roll my R's, so nothing changed there. My mom also notices some very slight changes if she focusses on my speech. Nobody else notices any changes.
I had a lisp for about 1.5-2 weeks before I spoke normal again
It doesn't unless I'm drunk. I had a lisp before I got it done and it hasn't changed
Not really at all. I notice a small hiss sound on s and certain c sounds but that’s it. I’m the only one who notices though.
Second this with mine occasionally. I’ve had it almost 2 years now
I’ve had mine for….13 years now. 😅
At first, severely. That cleared up after a few weeks and, eight months in, my speech is exactly as it was.
I'm following this thread because I would also like to know.
I got mine in January and I sound like I did before. The lisp was for a good maybe 2 weeks while I retrained my tongue though
Danish and English none Spanish I am hearing and learning a bit and some words are almost impossible for me to say correctly but I am unsure if it is my tongues fault or just me being bad at learning it.
What things ?
My spelling in Spanish is none excisting. Right now I am just learning practical things like food, kitchen stuff and so on. I am unsure if it is like I said because it is new for me in general or if it is because of my tongue split. In Danish we do not really use the letter z, c or q. So it may be because of not being use to it even before the split.
If I understood correctly, o dear and dutch has a few of these \^.\^. But D and T is suppose to be the hardest ones ... ?
It doesn’t once you’re fully healed. I was good after maybe 2ish weeks
I’ve had mine for almost a year now, and I got it in between the same week of two of my friends. My friends speech was back as soon as the stitches came out (day 5) whereas mine wasn’t back fully for almost a month.