Moratiming

Moratiming, or mora timing, is a concept in phonology and prosody that describes a way of organizing the rhythm of speech around morae, rather than around syllables or stress patterns alone. A mora is a unit of temporal length used to count timing in segments of speech. In mora-timed languages, each mora tends to have a relatively uniform duration, so the rhythm of speech is governed by the number of moras in a sequence rather than by syllable count alone.

In practical terms, moratiming assigns mora counts to syllables: short vowels or consonant clusters can contribute one or more moras, and longer vowels or codas may add additional moras. For example, under typical mora-timed analyses, a simple CV syllable may be 1 mora, while a CV with a coda consonant can be 2 moras. The overall tempo of utterances then aligns with mora cycles, producing a rhythm that can feel more uniform across syllables of different shapes.

Languages such as Japanese are commonly cited as exhibiting mora-timed rhythm, though actual rhythm is the subject of scholarly debate and may involve hybrid patterns. The mora-timing framework is used to contrast with syllable-timed and stress-timed models of rhythm, highlighting how timing units influence perception, timing in phonetic realization, and phonological theory.

Applications of moratiming appear in linguistic analysis, phonological theory, and speech technology, including text-to-speech systems and prosodic annotation. Critics note that real languages often display intermediate or mixed rhythmic patterns, making strict categorization an approximation rather than a universal rule. See also mora, prosody, rhythm in language, syllable-timed languages, stress-timed languages.