AccentU

AccentU is a theoretical framework used in linguistics and language technology to describe and annotate the placement of accent, or prosodic prominence, within syllables across languages. The term blends the English word "accent" with a scholarly suffix and is not an official standard in mainstream linguistics. It appears mainly in exploratory writings and experimental software that aim to make prosody more explicit in written text or in speech synthesis.

Notation in AccentU envisions marking the syllable that carries primary stress with a diacritic placed on its vowel, and optionally marking secondary stresses with a different diacritic. For example, the English word "example" might be written exámple to indicate primary stress on the second syllable. In languages with tone or pitch contrasts, AccentU supports adding tone marks on the syllable nucleus to reflect contour or high/low pitch as part of the same annotation system.

Implementation varies: in typography, diacritics may be embedded in the orthography; in digital text, AccentU annotations can be separate metadata or interleaved tokens. It is designed to assist language learners, screen readers, and speech synthesis alignment by providing an explicit map of prosody to written form.

History and adoption: AccentU is not an established standard and remains a topic of theoretical discussion and experimental tools. Critics point to increased typographic complexity, potential ambiguity across languages, and limited interoperability with existing orthographies. Proponents argue that a consistent notation could improve pronunciation guidance and automated prosody processing.

See also: prosody, lexical accent, diacritics, orthography, text-to-speech.