Japanese pitch accent

The several dialects of the Japanese language have a pitch accent, though the position of the accent for a given word varies among them. As for instance, standard Japanese for "now" is I-ma, but Kansai dialect has i-MA instead.

The accent rules in standard Japanese (hyoujungo) are presented here as an example:

1. If the accent is on the first syllable, then the pitch starts high and drops suddenly at the second syllable, then goes down more slowly. Nevertheless, Japanese speakers hear the first syllable as special.
2. If the accent is on a syllable other than the first or the last, then the pitch rises gradually until he syllable after the accented syllable, and there goes down suddenly. A native speaker will hear the accented vowel as highest that the rest, even though the maximum of the pitxh is physically in the next syllable.
3. If the word doesn't have an accent, the pitch rises continuously from a low at the start of the word to a high at its end. Just like French. About 80% of all Japanese words belong to this class, and the Japanese describe their sound as "flat" (heibon) or "accentless".

The foregoing description is based in speech analysis. Traditionally, however, accent is taught to Japanese-as-a-second-language learners using the "two-pitch-level theory". According to it, all Japanese syllables are either high or low in pitch, rather like the two levels of Navajo or the three levels of Yoruba. To illustrate, a word such as o-mo-si-RO-i, which has the accent in the fourth, is in fact pronounced with a gradually rising pitch from the beginning until the middle of the fifth syllable, then the pitch drops suddenly. But, according to the two-level theory, this word "should be" pronounced with a flat tone in each syllable: low-pitched o, high-pitched mo-shi-ro, and low-pitched i. This description is inexact but is good enough to be useful in class, when you are spelling out words one kana at a time. o - MO - SHI - RO - i. Please keep in mind that the Japanese never pronounce like that outside class, even when reciting classical poetry.

In poetry, "o-mo-shi-ro-i" would be pronounced in five beats, with the tone very gradually rising during the first four, then dropping suddenly at the i. Of course, outside poetry, the last two kana of "omoshiroi" get slurred into a diphtong, rhyming with "boy". The diphtong is pronounced with a descending tone.

Accent is sometimes taught to non-Japanese learners of Japanese, but it is never taught at the Japanese themselves at grade school, so most of them are not aware of its existence. If you mention before any Japanese any of the information in this page, most of them will flatly deny that there is any variation in pitch between Japanese syllables, and will remember you that "Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese" in a somewhat offended tone. Unfortunately enough, this does not necessarily mean that if you say HA-na when you meant to say ha-NA they'll understand you. They realize that they do pronounce these two words differently, but curiously enough they don't attribute that to a difference in pitch, but to a difference in kanji.

External link: Japanese word accent speech analysis