Chinese is known to have a large number of sentence-final particles (SFPs), many of which are said to express yǔqì 語氣 (roughly translatable as “modality”) of various kinds. Each Chinese dialect has its own set of SFPs, though some individual ones may cross dialectal boundaries.
1. Mandarin
The most commonly used SFPs in Mandarin, for instance, include le 了, ma 嗎, a/ya 啊/呀, ba 吧, ne 呢, me 嚜/嘛, etc. Quite a few of them have close counterparts, phonetically or functio…