diff --git a/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_base.py b/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_base.py
index 2f160a881bb1..2d7f7d851878 100644
--- a/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_base.py
+++ b/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_base.py
@@ -2279,6 +2279,14 @@ def __call__(
         )
 
         if is_batched:
+            if isinstance(text_pair, str):
+                raise TypeError(
+                    "when tokenizing batches of text, `text_pair` must be a list or tuple with the same length as `text`."
+                )
+            if text_pair is not None and len(text) != len(text_pair):
+                raise ValueError(
+                    f"batch length of `text`: {len(text)} does not match batch length of `text_pair`: {len(text_pair)}."
+                )
             batch_text_or_text_pairs = list(zip(text, text_pair)) if text_pair is not None else text
             return self.batch_encode_plus(
                 batch_text_or_text_pairs=batch_text_or_text_pairs,