Are there any purely monosyllabic languages in use today?

Question

All languages in the world that I know of use words with more than one syllable. Are there any where all words have strictly one syllable? That would mean that there is just one vocal cluster per word, be it a single vowel (short or long) or a diphthong.

I have read that Chinese or Vietnamese has polysyllabic words even though morphemes are monosyllabic. That would be the closest I have found. Are there any real monosyllabic languages out there?

As @leoboiko explains below, the number of possible syllables would need to be quite high to support a sizeable vocabulary. But it is not unfeasible to combine e.g. 30 consonants 'C' with 9 vowels 'V' with 5 semi-consonants S, to yield 30 x 5 x 9 x 5 x 30 ~ 200k possible combinations with the structure CSVSC. Adding some tones like in SE languages would give us even more possibilities. The question is, does this happen in practice?

Answer 1

The official Chinese language isn't "supposed to" be monosyllabic, at all. That's a misconception. Chinese languages are polysyllabic and that's it, including the putonghua standard (the pīnyīn orthographic standard, for example, includes rules to space the letters by polysyllabic words).

The confusion arises because Chinese morphemes are usually monosyllabic, so that most (not all!) syllables are also morphemes (source: Packard, The Morphology of Chinese). This feature is reflected in the traditional writing system, which is syllabic, and thus lends an impression of "monosyllabism". But morphemes are not words, and syllables being morphemes isn't the same as the language being monosyllabic.

In the past, some people (Karlgren) have argued that Chinese used to be monosyllabic. According to this old hypothesis, the syllables used to be more complex, and were used as independent words; as the phonetic system simplified, they supposedly became too similar to one another, so that new, polysyllabic words had to be coined. However, in reality polysyllabic words occur throughout the historical record; they're not new at all (see: Mair, Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia, & forthcoming; and Dong, The Prosody and Morphology of Elastic Words in Chinese).

It's not hard to see why languages aren't monosyllabic. English has well over 100,000 words; so does my copy of the CEDICT Chinese dictionary. Even with tones and unusually complex syllables, the number of possible syllables hardly reaches the low-tens of thousands. So a language that was monosyllabic would have to deal with an unusually restricted vocabulary—and the words would sound confusingly similar to one another, to boot.

Answer 2

Replying to this old thread, as someone who is Vietnamese, for island we use one word đảo. And yes grasshopper is one of those words we duplicate a word but it's hardly important – it's like saying "it's really red red". Grasshopper is essentially 'scratch scratch'.

I'd agree Vietnamese is monosyllabic and it's actually a feature I thought other languages must of had which is how I found this thread.

Answer 3

In my point of view, Chinese and maybe Vietnamese and Thai are really monosyllabic. But big part of words are compound words of two or three monosyllabic words. Like pinyin "duibuqi", "sorry", is a compound word composed of three monosyllabic words, dui, bu and qi. These "really", "not" and "up" monosyllabic words together form a compound word, "duibuqi".

But all these separate monosyllabic words are used also independently as separate words, both alone and in other compound words.

My mother language is Finnish, and in Finland there is an obsession to "write words together", forming extremely long compound words. Making Finnish difficult to read and learn for non Finnish speakers.

Answer 4

Vietnamese is monosyllabic, at least according to some teachers of Vietnamese to non-Viet speakers.