Pitch-accent language

rdf:langString Pitch-accent language

rdf:langString A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch (linguistic tone) rather than by loudness (or length), as in many languages, like English. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese and Standard Chinese, in which each syllable can have an independent tone. Some have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just 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, Norwegian, Swedish (but not in Finland), 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 high–low) 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.