Creaky voice, breathy voice and glottal stop
One of the most distinguishing features of the Northern accent is the sounds that speakers make when pronouncing dấu nặng and dấu ngã. These "charring" sounds are generated by constricting the vocal folds - the same organs in your throat that you use every day to talk. For example, when you say a vowel like "a" in a regular voice, your vocal folds vibrate. If you whisper that "a", on the other hand, the vocal folds don't exhibit this vibration (You can feel the difference if you put your hand on your throat while making these sounds). Finally, if you have those vocal folds vibrate at a really low frequency, that's when you get a creaky voice. All these various types of producing voice are known as phonation. Although I think in reality it's a bit more complicated, but in the simplest form, phonation can be thought of as a range from whispering to glottal stop. This range is usually divided into three sub-sections, called breathy, modal and creaky. Breathy is like murmuring and close to whispering. Modal is the normal type of voice you use every day. Creaky, as already explained previously, is when you talk in a super low voice. And the glottal stop is when you close the airways completely for a moment - like right after the "uh" in the utterance "uh-oh".
So, in Vietnamese, tones don't just differ in pitch and length, but also in phonation. In the Northern dialect, these differences are very marked. Dấu nặng and dấu ngã are usually pronounced in a creaky voice along with a glottal stop. That said, I believe these tones may also be pronounced with creaky voice alone - omitting glottalization - depending on the speaker's background and the context. As for dấu huyền, many text books and papers claim that it is pronounced with breathy voice. However, I have not been able to observe this consistently. The only time I can clearly identify breathy voice (or what I perceive to be such) is in words with dấu huyền or dấu hỏi that appear at the end of a sentence. But only a minority of speakers seem to have this habit and only some of the time.
So far, only Northern Vietnamese has been considered. According to theory, there is no phonation in Southern Vietnamese. But I think it could be argued that there is some of it in SV as well. However, this is mostly restricted to dấu nặng and dấu hỏi (although less common in the latter). In SV, dấu nặng is a really low tone, so oftentimes, it's just natural to pronounce it with creaky voice. You can often observe speakers using creaky voice in sentences like "tại sao?" or "bậy!".
Video with examples:
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