Pitch Accent

Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe certain Scandinavian and South Slavic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Japanese, Korean, Hiaki and Shanghainese. Although it has been claimed that "pitch accent" is not a coherently defined term, it is commonly understood to refer to a language that uses phonemic tone, but where only one or two syllables in a word can be phonemically marked for tone, and many words are not marked for tone at all. In such languages, the syllable with phonemic tone typically is acoustically prominent, in a similar fashion to the dynamic stress of languages such as English or Spanish.

Pitch-accented languages may have a more complex accentual system than stress-accented languages, in that in some cases they have more than a binary distinction, but are sometimes less complex than fully tonal languages such as Chinese or Yoruba, which may assign tone to an entire word without association to specific syllables, or which may assign a separate tone to each syllable. For example, Japanese allows short nouns (1-4 moras) to have tone on any one mora, but more frequently on none at all, so that in disyllabic words there are three-way minimal contrasts such as káki "oyster" vs. kakí "fence" vs. kaki "persimmon"); Ancient Greek in contrast had obligatory tone on one of three final moras, so that if the tonic syllable had a long vowel or diphthong, it had either a rising or a falling tone. In addition, the mapping between phonemic and phonetic tone may be more involved than the simple one-to-one mapping between stress and dynamic intensity in stress-accented languages.

Proto-Indo-European accent is usually reconstructed as a free pitch-accent system, preserved in Ancient Greek, Vedic, and Proto-Balto-Slavic. The Greek and Indic systems were lost: Modern Greek has a pitch produced stress accent, and it was lost entirely from Indic by the time of the Prākrits. Balto-Slavic retained Proto-Indo-European pitch accent, reworking it into the opposition of "acute" (rising) and "circumflex" (falling) tone, and which, following a period of extensive accentual innovations, yielded pitch-accent based system that has been retained in modern-day Lithuanian and West South Slavic languages (in some dialects). Some other modern Indo-European languages have pitch accent systems, like Swedish and Norwegian, deriving from a stress-based system they inherited from Old Norse, and Punjabi, which developed tone distinctions that maintained lexical distinctions as consonants were conflated.