Kraftbetonten

Kraftbetonten is a linguistic term used to describe syllables or segments that carry the strongest degree of stress within a word or phrase. The concept distinguishes kraftbetonten (strongly stressed) elements from unstressed or weakly stressed ones, and it is central to the study of prosody and phonology.

In descriptive linguistics, kraftbetonten syllables are typically characterized by features such as greater loudness, longer duration, and often higher pitch or fuller vowel quality compared to other syllables in the word. The exact phonetic realization of this stress can vary between languages and dialects, and may also be influenced by speech rate, focus, and syntactic boundaries.

The notion is used to analyze word-level and phrase-level stress patterns. For example, languages may exhibit different stress systems (such as trochaic, where the first syllable is kraftbetont, versus iambic, where the second syllable is). The position of primary stress can be lexical (determined by the word) or predictable from morphological and phonological rules, and some languages also allow secondary stress on additional syllables.

Kraftbetonten is often discussed in relation to orthography, since spelling does not usually mark stress, and dictionaries or phonology textbooks may indicate stress positions with diacritics or symbols. The concept helps explain phenomena such as vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, rhythmic structure of speech, and the way emphasis affects intelligibility and meaning in spoken language.