Verbal puzzles perpetuating practical principles of plain and perfect pronunciation. Or,
more scientifically defined, a tongue twister is “…a kind of speech play which has as its
goal the correct pronunciation of combinations of words that are difficult to articulate
rapidly and repeatedly” (Jorgensen 1981:67). The best-known example in English is the one beginning “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…” which first appeared in
print in 1674 as part of an entire alphabet comprising “a weird collection of characters,
from Andrew Airpump to Walter Waddle” (Schwartz 1972:117).
Tongue twisters may be as short as two words—”toy boat,” “truly rural,” “Peggy
Babcock,” or “preshrunk shirts,” for example—their difficulty lying in the challenge to
repeat the same simple phrase several times rapidly without error. But most tongue
twisters are complete sentences like “She sells sea shells by the sea shore”; “Around the
rugged rock the ragged rascal ran”; and “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a
woodchuck could chuck wood?” The latter example is often parodied, yielding such
variations as “How many cans can a cannibal nibble, if a cannibal can nibble cans?”
Among the tongue-twister sentences that may lead one to uttering an impolite word
are those beginning, “I slit a sheet a sheet I slit…” and “I’m not a fig plucker nor a fig
plucker’s son…” A similar challenge—not to slip into a risque utterance—occurs in the
tongue-twister song that starts “Sarah, Sarah, sitting in a shoe shine shop./All day long
she shines and sits…” Most tongue twisters, however, are innocent of such indecencies,
or go no further in that direction than something like “He ran from the Indies to the
Andes in his undies.”
Besides tongue-twister songs, there are also tongue-tangling rhymes, such as the wellknown limerick about the “tutor who tooted the flute” who “tried to tutor two tooters to
toot….” But a truly challenging tongue twister need not be lengthy or elaborate, since
there is difficulty aplenty in trying to repeat several times without error something as
deceptively simple as “Rubber baby buggy bumpers.”
Tongue twisters, in general, function merely as entertainment, or (in the case of the
off-color references) as pranks. However, some further functions have been documented,
including to practice proper articulation for public speaking and singing, to test the fit of
a new set of false teeth, to audition actors, and to train students in speaking foreign
languages. A German class, for example, might struggle with this jaw breaker: “Wir
Wiener Waschweiber würden weisse Wäsche waschen wenn wir wüssten wo wärmes
Wasser wäre” (We washerwomen of Vienna would wash our washing white if we knew
where some warm water was). Much simpler, but still a tough line to pronounce, is the
Norwegian phrase “fire ferske friske fiske” (four fine fresh fish).
Tongue twisters are usually thought of as children’s folklore, but they seem to be well
remembered by people of all ages. When one writer mentioned his interest in this genre
in a magazine circulated nationally, he received more than 13,000 tongue twisters from
readers. Most contributors mentioned oral tradition via older friends and relatives as their
sources (Potter 1972:1117). An experiment asking subjects to recite tongue twisters until
a mistake was made revealed the kinds of errors most likely to occur and the sound
combinations most frequently leading to mistakes. Confusion of similar morphemes was
the most common kind of error, yielding garbled phrases such as “See shells she sells…”
or “Rugger baby bubby gumpers…” Some subjects in the experiment, however,
employed strategies for improving their performances, such as setting the texts to mental
music, following a rhythmic beat in pronouncing them, grouping words together into
patterns, or not thinking about the meaning of the words being said (Jorgensen 1981).
Jan Harold Brunvand
References
Emrich, Duncan. 1955. The Ancient Game of Tongue-Twisters. American Heritage 6
(February):119–120.
Jorgensen, Marilyn. 1981. TheTickled, Tangled, Tripped, and Twisted Tongue: A Linguistic Study
of Factors Relating to Difficulty in the Performance of Tongue Twisters. New York Folklore
7:67–81.
Potter, Charles Francis. [1949] 1972. Tongue Twisters. In Standard Dictionary of Folklore,
Mythology, and Legend, ed. Maria Leach and Jerome Fried. New York: Harper and Row, pp.
1117–1119.
Schwartz, Alvin. 1972. A Twister of Twists, a Tangler of Tongues. Philadelphia: Lippincott