Accentuons

Accent-uons is a hypothetical notation system for annotating prosodic emphasis in written text. It aims to provide a language-neutral way to mark syllable-level stress to aid linguistic analysis, language teaching, and speech technology. The term is used in discussions as a provisional concept and is not a widely adopted standard.

The accentuons scheme attaches a diacritic to vowels within stressed syllables. A primary stress is indicated with an acute diacritic on the vowel of the stressed syllable; a secondary stress with a grave diacritic. Optional markers could designate tertiary stress or pitch patterns. The approach is intended to be compatible with existing orthographies and can be layered on top of normal spellings or used in parallel transcription forms. The marks are designed to be machine-readable and human-readable, and to be language-neutral.

Usage and status: In education, it could help learners map pronunciation to orthography; in corpus linguistics, it would facilitate automatic annotation of stress; in speech synthesis, it could guide prosodic modeling. There are challenges: lack of a formal standard, potential confusion with existing diacritics, cross-language variation in what constitutes primary versus secondary stress, and encoding and font support. As a conceptual framework, accentuons has not been adopted as a universal standard, but it remains a point of reference in discussions about prosodic annotation and multilingual readability.

See also: Stress (linguistics), Prosody, Orthography, Phonology.