Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. In a pitch-accented language, there is one accented syllable or mora in a word, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word.

This is unlike the situation in tone languages, where the tone of each syllable can be independent of the other syllables in the word. For example, comparing two-syllable words like in a pitch-accented language and in a tonal language, both of which only distinguish low tone from high, the tonal language has four possible patterns: low-low ^*," target="_blank" >high-low ^*." target="_blank" >The pitch-accent language, on the other hand, only has two possibilities: accented on the first syllable, ^*.

In Indo-European languages

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It is hypothesized that Proto-Indo-European had a pitch accent system. Some well-known ancient Indo-European tongues to have preserved this feature are:

• Ancient Greek had a pitch accent, which later changed into a stress accent (where accented syllables are pronounced more forcefully, as in English, instead of having a higher pitch).
• Vedic Sanskrit.

In other Indo-European languages, such as Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, and Serbo-Croatian (from Proto-Slavic), a new pitch accent system evolved that is unrelated to that of Proto-Indo-European.

In Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) has four types of pitch accent: short falling, short rising, long falling and long rising. The long accents are realized by pitch change within the long vowel; the short ones are realized by the pitch difference from the subsequent syllableLexical, Pragmatic, and Positional Effects on Prosody in Two Dialects of Croatian and Serbian, Rajka Smiljanic, Routledge, ISBN 0415971179 . Monosyllabic lexical words always have a falling tone. Polysyllabic words may also have a falling tone, but (with the exception of foreign borrowings and interjections) only on the first syllable. However, they may instead have a rising tone, on any syllable but the last. Accent shifts are very frequent in declension and conjugation, both by type and placement in the word.

Proclitics (clitics which latch on to a following word), on the other had, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a rising tone) from the following mono- or bisyllabic word. This stolen accent is always short, and may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic. This phenomenon (accent shift to proclitic) is most frequent in Bosnian dialects, in Serbian dialects is more limited (normally, with negation proclitic ne), and almost absent from CroatianA Handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, Wayles Brown and Theresa Alt, SEELRC 2004. Short rising accent resists such shift better than the falling one (as seen in the example /ʒěli:m/→/ne‿ʒěli:m/)

	in isolation		with proclitic
			Croatian	Serbian	Bosnian	English
rising		I want	colspan="3" align="center"	I don't want
		winter				in the winter
		impossibility	colspan=3 align="center"	outside possibility
falling		I see	colspan="3" align="center"	I don't see
		town				to town (stays falling)
		wood				in the wood (becomes rising)

In Japanese

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Japanese is often described as having pitch accent. (See Japanese pitch accent.) However, unlike in Serbo-Croatian, it is only found in about 20% of Japanese words; 80% are unaccented. This "accent" may be characterized as a downstep rather than as pitch accent. The pitch of a word rises until it reaches a downstep, then drops abruptly. In a two-syllable word, this results in a contrast between high-low and low-high; accentless words are also low-high, but the pitch of following enclitics differentiates them.

Accent on first mora			Accent on second mora			Accentless
	牡蠣	oyster		垣	fence		柿	persimmon
high-low-low			low-high-low			low-high-high

In Shanghainese

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The Shanghai dialect of Wu Chinese is marginally tonal, with characteristics of pitch accent.

Not counting closed syllables (those with a final glottal stop), a Shanghainese word of one syllable may carry one of three tones, high, mid, low. (These tones have a contour in isolation, but for our purposes that can be ignored.) However, low always occurs after voiced consonants, and only there. Thus the only tonal distinction is after voiceless consonants and in vowel-initial syllables, and then there is only a two-way distinction between high and mid. In a polysyllabic word, the tone of the first syllable determines the tone of the entire word. If the first tone is high, following syllables are mid; if mid or low, the second syllable is high, and any following syllables are mid. Thus a mark for high tone is all that is needed to write tone in Shanghainese:

Voiced initial	zaunheinin	上海人	low-high-mid	"Shanghaier"
No voiced initial (mid tone)	aodaliya	澳大利亚	mid-high-mid-mid	"Australia"
No voiced initial (high tone)	kónkonchitso	公共汽車	high-mid-mid-mid	"bus"

See also

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• Timing (linguistics)
• Tonal language
• Stress accent

External link

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• http://www.geocities.com/caraculiambro/Caraculiambro/Stress.html

Phonology

Ordaccent | 音高重音