A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (linguistic tone) rather than by volume or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent languages also contrast with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Central Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are a sub-category of tonal languages in general.
Languages that have been described as pitch-accent languages include: most dialects of Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Baltic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Tlingit, Turkish, Japanese, Limburgish, Norwegian, Swedish, Western Basque, Yaqui, certain dialects of Korean, Shanghainese, and Livonian.
Pitch-accent languages tend to fall into two categories: those with a single pitch-contour (for example, high, or highlow) on the accented syllable, such as Tokyo Japanese, Western Basque, or Persian; and those in which more than one pitch-contour can occur on the accented syllable, such as Punjabi, Swedish, or Serbo-Croatian. In this latter kind, the accented syllable is also often stressed another way.
Some of the languages considered pitch-accent languages, in addition to accented words, also have accentless words (e.g., Japanese and Western Basque); in others all major words are accented (e.g., Blackfoot and Barasana).
The term "pitch accent" is also used to denote a different feature, namely the use of pitch when speaking to give selective prominence (accent) to a syllable or mora within a phrase.
Characteristics of pitch-accent languages Definitions Scholars give various definitions of a pitch-accent language. A typical definition is as follows: "Pitch-accent systems [are] systems in which one syllable is more prominent than the other syllables in the same word, a prominence that is achieved by means of pitch" (). That is to say, in a pitch-accent language, in order to indicate how a word is pronounced it is necessary, as with a stress-accent language, to mark only one syllable in a word as accented, not specify the tone of every syllable. This feature of having only one prominent syllable in a word or morpheme is known as culminativity.
Another property suggested for pitch-accent languages to distinguish them from stress languages is that "Pitch accent languages must satisfy the criterion of having invariant tonal contours on accented syllables ... This is not so for pure stress languages, where the tonal contours of stressed syllables can vary freely" (). Although this is true of many pitch-accent languages, there are others, such as the Franconian dialects, in which the contours vary, for example between declarative and interrogative sentences.
According to another proposal, pitch-accent languages can only use F0 (i.e., pitch) to mark the accented syllable, whereas stress languages may also use duration and intensity (). However, other scholars disagree, and find that intensity and duration can also play a part in the accent of pitch-accent languages ().
A feature considered characteristic of stress-accent languages is that a stress-accent is obligatory, that is, that every major word has to have an accent. This is not always true of pitch-accent languages, some of which, like Japanese and Northern Bizkaian Basque, have accentless words. But there are also some pitch-accent languages in which every word has an accent.
One feature shared between pitch-accent languages and stress-accent languages is demarcativeness: prominence peaks tend to occur at or near morpheme edges (word/stem initial, word/stem penult, word/stem final).
Often, however, the difference between a pitch-accent language, a stress-accent language, and tonal language is not clear. "It is, in fact, often not straightforward to decide whether a particular pitch system is best described as tonal or accentual. ... Since raised pitch, especially when it coincides with vowel length, makes a syllable perceptually more prominent, it can often require detailed phonetic and phonological analysis to disentangle whether pitch is playing a more stress-like or a more tone-like role in a particular language" ().
argues that tone is made up of a variety of different typological features, which can be mixed and matched with some independence from each other. Hyman claims that there can be no coherent definition of pitch-accent, as the term describes languages that have non-prototypical combinations of tone system properties (or both a tone system, usually still non-prototypical, and a stress system simultaneously). Since all pitch-accent languages can be analysed just as well in purely tonal terms, in Hyman's view, the term "pitch-accent" should be superseded by a wider understanding of what qualifies as a tone system - thus, all "pitch-accent" languages are tone languages, and there is simply more variety within tone systems than has historically been admitted.
Characteristics of the accent High vs. low accent When one particular tone is marked in a language in contrast to unmarked syllables, it is usual for it to be a high tone. There are, however, a few languages in which the marked tone is a low tone, for example the Dogrib language of northwestern Canada, (draft) the Kansai dialect of Japanese, and certain Bantu languages of the Congo such as Ciluba and Ruund.
Disyllabic accents One difference between a pitch accent and a stress accent is that it is not uncommon for a pitch accent to be realised over two syllables. Thus in Serbo-Croatian, the difference between a "rising" and a "falling" accent is observed only in the pitch of the syllable following the accent: the accent is said to be "rising" if the following syllable is as high as or higher than the accented syllable, but "falling" if it is lower (see Serbo-Croatian phonology#Pitch accent).
In Vedic Sanskrit, the ancient Indian grammarians described the accent as being a high pitch () followed by a falling tone () on the following syllable; but occasionally, when two syllables had merged, the high tone and the falling tone were combined on one syllable.
In Standard Swedish, the difference between accent 1 and accent 2 can only be heard in words of two or more syllables, since the tones take two syllables to be realised. In Värmland as well as Norrland accent 1 and 2 can be heard in monosyllabic words however. In the central Swedish dialect of Stockholm, citation forms of words with accent 1 have a LHL contour and a HLHL contour when marked with accent 2, with an additional peak in the second syllable.
In Welsh, in most words the accent is realised as a low tone on the penultimate syllable (which is also stressed) followed by a high tone on the final; but in some dialects this LH contour may take place entirely within the penultimate syllable.
Similarly in the Chichewa language of Malawi a tone on a final syllable often spreads backwards to the penultimate syllable, so that the word is actually pronounced Chichēwā with two mid-tones, or Chichěwā, with a rising tone on the penultimate syllable. Sentence-finally it can become Chichěwà with a rising tone on the penultimate and a low tone on the final. (draft)
Peak delay A phenomenon observed in a number of languages, both fully tonal ones and those with pitch-accent systems, is peak delay. In this, the high point (peak) of a high tone does not synchronise exactly with the syllable itself, but is reached at the beginning of the following syllable, giving the impression that the high tone has spread over two syllables. The Vedic Sanskrit accent described above has been interpreted as an example of peak delay.
One-mora accents Conversely, a pitch accent in some languages can target just part of a syllable, if the syllable is bi-moraic. Thus in Luganda, in the word "Baganda people" the accent is considered to occur on the first mora of the syllable , but in "Buganda (region)" it occurs on the second half (with spreading back to the first half). In Ancient Greek, similarly, in the word () "houses" the accent is on the first half of the syllable oi, but in () "at home" on the second half. An alternative analysis is to see Luganda and Ancient Greek as belonging to the type of languages where there is a choice of different contours on an accented syllable.
High tone spread Anticipation In some pitch-accent languages, the high pitch of the accent can be anticipated in the preceding syllable or syllables, for example, Japanese "head", Basque "the friend's grandmother", Turkish "you would not get angry", Belgrade Serbian "pepper", Ancient Greek "it demands".Seikilos epitaph line 4. See also:
Forwards spreading Forwards spreading of a tone is also common in some languages. For example, in the Northern Ndebele language of Zimbabwe, the tonal accent on the prefix ú- spreads forward to all the syllables in the word except the last two: "to laugh"; "to make one another laugh". Sometimes the sequence HHHH then becomes LLLH, so that in the related language Zulu, the equivalent of these words is and with an accent shifted to the antepenultimate syllable.
In Yaqui, the accent is signalled by an upstep before the accented syllable. The high pitch continues after the accent, declining slightly, until the next accented syllable. Thus it is the opposite of Japanese, where the accent is preceded by high pitch, and its position is signalled by a downstep after the accented syllable.
Plateau between accents In other languages the high pitch of an accent, instead of dropping to a low on the following syllable, in some circumstances can continue in a plateau to the next accented syllable, as in Luganda "it is in Buganda" (contrast "it is in Bunyoro", in which Bunyóró is unaccented apart from automatic default tones).
Plateauing is also found in Chichewa, where in some circumstances a sequence of HLH can change to HHH. For example, + "with a bicycle" makes with a plateau.
In Western Basque and Luganda, the default high tones automatically added to accentless words can spread in a continuous plateau through the phrase as far as the first accent, for example, in Basque "John's friend's grandmother", Luganda "people in the city".
Simple pitch-accent languages According to the first two criteria above, the Tokyo dialect of Japanese is often considered a typical pitch-accent language, since the pronunciation of any word can be specified by marking just one syllable as accented, and in every word the accent is realised by a fall in pitch immediately after the accented syllable. In the examples below the accented syllable is marked in bold (the particle indicates that the word is subject): "pillow" "you" "head" "fish" (unaccented)
In Japanese there are also other high-toned syllables, which are added to the word automatically, but these do not count as accents, since they are not followed by a low syllable. As can be seen, some of the words in Japanese have no accent.
In Proto-Indo-European and its descendant, Vedic Sanskrit, the system is comparable to Tokyo Japanese and Cupeño in most respects, specifying pronunciation through inherently accented morphemes such as and (Vedic and ) and inherently unaccented morphemes. The examples below demonstrate the formation of such words using morphemes: PIE > "shining" (Vedic ) PIE > "heard (of), famous" (Vedic )
If there are multiple accented morphemes, the accent is determined by specific morphophonological principles. Below is a comparison of Vedic, Tokyo Japanese and Cupeño regarding accent placement: Vedic > "with the cow" Japanese > "if (he) reads" Cupeño > "(he) wants"