Musical Accent

in linguistics, one of the means of emphasizing the stressed syllable in a phonetic word.

Musical accent makes use of melodic characteristics differing in tonal quality and complexity, for example, rising, falling, rising-falling, falling-rising, and double-peak tones. These tones can be produced at different voice registers: high, low, or middle. In languages with musical accent, there is a given set of possible melodic characteristics for the stressed syllable, which serves to differentiate the meanings of words. A stressed syllable, or a mora (the minimal unit of measure in quantitative verse), may serve as a unit of measure in the realization of melodic characteristics. Musical accent differs from the melodic component of word stress in languages with monotonic stress, in which the type of melody accompanying a stressed syllable is not phonemic.

Languages with musical accent include Vietnamese, Slovenian, Swedish, and many Sino-Tibetan and African languages.