Accents

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In addition to the sounds described above, most languages use supersegmental features which vary the volume (loudness), musical pitch and timing of sounds. We'll describe them in that order.

Stress

English is a good example of a language with stress: some syllables are pronounced louder, at higher pitch and held longer than they otherwise would be. English words usually have one stressed syllable : the native stress falls on the first syllable of a word, but imported words often have stress on the next-to-last (penultimate) syllable. "Small" words like articles and common prepositions and conjunctions often have no stress, as if they were part of the following word.

Here's how high vowels are used :

• In languages with neither tone nor stress, high vowels aren't used, and all vowels are written low.
• In languages with a stress accent, like English, Spanish or Russian, high vowels are used for stressed vowels, and unstressed vowels are written low.
• In languages with a pitch accent, like Japanese, high vowels are used for the last syllable before the fall in pitch, and other vowels are written low.
• In languages with tonal word accents, like Swedish and Norwegian, words with acute accent (accent 1 or single accent) use a high vowel on the first syllable, and words with grave accent (accent 2 or double accent) use a hig vowel on the second syllable.
• In languages with two register tones, like Navajo, high tones are written with high vowels, and low tones are written with low vowels.
• High pitch tones also cause vowels to be written high, as described below.

Tones

Many languages also use tones to vary the musical pitch of vowels. Shwa spells tones using small accent marks over or under the vowels. There are three of them :

Let me show you an example of how these accents are used to write tones. In Chinese, there are four tones, and a "fifth" tone consisting of no tone. Here are examples:

中文	Pinyin	Tone Number	Tone Description	Shwa Tone Name	Shwa
妈	mā	1st tone	Level tone	High Level tone
麻	má	2nd tone	Rising tone	High Rising tone
马	mǎ	3rd tone	Dipping tone	Low Level tone
骂	mà	4th tone	Falling tone	High Falling tone
吗	ma	"5th" tone	Neutral tone	No tone

So far, so good. Here's how it extends to some other well-known tonal languages:

Tone	Shwa	Language	Tone Name
Mid tone		Chinese	Neutral ("5th")
		Cantonese	Upper Departing (3rd)
		Vietnamese	ngang (level)
		Thai	Mid
High Rising tone		Chinese	Rising (2nd)
		Cantonese	Upper Rising (2nd)
		Vietnamese	ngã (tumbling)
High Level tone		Chinese	High (1st)
		Hong Kong Cantonese	Upper Level (1st)
		Thai	High
High Falling tone		Chinese	Falling (4th)
		Guangzhou Cantonese	Upper Falling (1st)
		Vietnamese	nặng (heavy)
Low Falling tone		Chinese	3rd before a different tone
		Cantonese	Lower Level (4th)
		Vietnamese	hỏi (asking)
		Thai	Falling
Low Level tone		Chinese	Dipping (3rd)
		Cantonese	Lower Departing (6th)
		Vietnamese	huyền (hanging)
		Thai	Low
Low Rising tone		Chinese	3rd before another 3rd tone
		Cantonese	Lower Rising (5th)
		Thai	Rising
		Vietnamese	sắc (sharp)

Here's how the tone signs are used :

• In languages with pitch accents, like Swedish and Norwegian, only the falling accent is used: low for tone 1 (grave), and high for tone 2 (acute).
• In languages with three register tones, like most Bantu languages, high tones are spelled with the High Level tone, low tones are written with the Low Level tone, and mid vowels don't need a tone sign.
• In languages with contour tones, like Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Thai, the tone signs are used as shown in the chart above. Here's an example from Cantonese, in Alphabet gait:
  Yùhgwó go-go dôujáu saai, bîngo léih Hêunggóng a?
• In languages with tone sandhi - where tones change depending on the context - the tone may change based on the context. In such cases, the tone sign also changes. For example, when two Chinese syllables with Low Resting tone occur together, the first becomes Low Rising and the second one becomes Low Falling.

Vowel Voice

The accents are also used to indicate vowel voicing, the vowel equivalent of the phonation discussed on the More Voices page. Most languages only distinguish among their vowels using "major" features: high-mid-low, front-back, round-compressed-spread, short-long, nasalization and tone, and you already know how to write those in Shwa.

But some languages also distinguish vowels based on the position of the tongue root (advanced or retracted), pharyngealization, stridency or phonation: there are creaky, hollow, stiff, slack, harsh and breathy vowels.

As with consonants, Shwa doesn't try to capture the details. In languages which display any of these features, we use the three accents for them, reserving the unaccented letters for "normal" vowels. The spelling is standardized as follows:

Accent	Feature
Rising	advanced tongue root, slack, harsh or breathy
Falling	retracted tongue root, pharyngealized, stiff, hollow, or creaky (stød)
Level	strident, voiceless, doubly marked or anything else

As far as I know, there's no ambiguity within languages, although of course the accents mean different things in different languages.

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