pitchaccent

Pitch accent is a phonological feature of certain languages in which pitch differences on syllables or morae are used to distinguish words or grammatical forms. In pitch-accent systems, a relatively small set of distinct pitch patterns exists, and many syllables may be pronounced with a neutral pitch. This contrasts with tone languages, where a larger number of syllables carry contrastive pitch.

In many pitch-accent languages, each word has a nucleus—a syllable or mora with a prominent pitch peak—sometimes followed by a downstep that lowers the pitch of subsequent material. The exact pattern depends on the language and dialect; two, or sometimes more, patterns may be phonemic.

Languages widely cited as pitch-accent include Japanese, in which pitch patterns determine the contour of a word’s pronunciation, and Swedish and Norwegian, which use two lexically distinct pitch patterns often described as accent 1 and accent 2 (also referred to as acute and grave, or high and low). In such languages, pitch patterns interact with stress and intonation and may carry lexical or grammatical information.

Not all languages with pitch cues fit neatly into the category; some have mixed systems or a gradient of prominence rather than discrete categories. Researchers study pitch accent through phonological analyses, acoustic measurements, and cross-linguistic comparisons to understand how pitch contributes to word identity and sentence prosody.