Sentence final particle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A sentence final particle is an utterance at the end of a sentence. It does not carry any meaning by themselves, and are usually added to improve the flow of colloquial speech. It is used in Cantonese, for example the particles "le", "la", "lo", and "ge". These particles act as qualifiers for the spoken verse. These are also present in other Asian languages such as Thai.

In Japanese, there are many sentence final particles which are used in formal speech as well as colloquial. Some examples include:

• yo : assertive. It means that you are asserting what preceded the particle as information you are confident in.
• ne : agreement. Used when the speaker wants to verify or otherwise show agreement with the the listener.
• kke : doubt. Used when one is unsure of something. For example, "Kinou dattakke", "Was it yesterday?". Often used when talking to oneself.

English also has some words that act somewhat like sentence final particles, but primarily only in colloquial speech. For example:

• "man" in "Don't do it, man."
• "right" in "The black one, right?"
• "you know" in "That's what it was like back then, you know?"

[edit] External links

• Thai Particles (Large list of Thai particles with explanations and example sentences).