nonaccent

Nonaccent is a term used to describe the absence of an accent in various linguistic and orthographic contexts. In phonology and phonetics, a nonaccented syllable is one that does not bear primary or secondary stress. Vowels in nonaccented positions are often reduced or shortened in many languages, though patterns vary by language. For example, in English, function words and certain unstressed prefixes may occur in nonaccented syllables, contributing to the language’s rhythm and intonation.

In orthography and typography, nonaccent refers to characters without diacritical marks such as accents, tildes, or umlauts. Nonaccented letters are the plain forms found in ASCII and other diacritic-free representations. Diacritic removal, or unaccenting, is a common normalization step in text processing to improve search, sorting, and data interoperability. Examples include converting café to cafe or naïve to naive.

In information processing and linguistics, distinguishing accented and nonaccented forms supports tasks such as phonological analysis, transcription, and data normalization. Some languages have complex accent systems, and understanding which syllables are nonaccented helps describe prosody, rhythm, and intelligibility within speech.

See also: accent, stress, diacritic, unaccented, ASCII, Unicode normalization.