Standard Japanese
Normative pitch accent, essentially the pitch accent of the Tokyo Yamanote dialect, is considered fundamental in jobs such as broadcasting. The current specification for pitch accent are provided in special accent dictionaries for native speakers such as the Shin Meikai Nihongo Akusento Jiten 新明解日本語アクセント辞典 and the NHK Nihongo Hatsuon Akusento Jiten NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典. Newsreaders and other speech experienced are requested to undertake these standards.
Foreign learners of Japanese are often non taught to pronounce the pitch accent, though it is described in some subjected texts, such as . Incorrect pitch accent is a strong characteristic of a "foreign accent" in Japanese.
In standards Japanese, pitch accent has the following effect on words spoken in isolation:
Note that accent rules apply to phonological words, which include any following particles. So the sequence "hashi" spoken in isolation can be accented in two ways, either háshi accent on the first syllable, meaning 'chopsticks' or hashí flat or accent on thesyllable, meaning either 'edge' or 'bridge', while "hashi" plus the subject-marker "ga" can be accented on the first syllable or the second, or be flat/accentless: háshiga 'chopsticks', hashíga 'bridge', or hashiga 'edge'.
In poetry, a word such as 面白い omoshirói, which has the accent on the fourth mora ro, is pronounced in five beats morae. When initial in the phrase and therefore starting out with a low pitch, the pitch typically rises on the o, levels out at mid range on the moshi, peaks on the ro, and then drops suddenly on the i, producing a falling tone on the roi.
In all cases butaccent, there is a general declination gradual decline of pitch across the phrase. This, and the initial rise, are component of the prosody of the phrase, not lexical accent, and are larger in scope than the phonological word. That is, within the overall pitch-contour of the phrase there may be more than one phonological word, and thus potentially more than one accent.
The foregoing describes the actual pitch. In almost guides, however, accent is submission with a two-pitch-level model. In this representation, each mora is either high H or low L in pitch, with the shift from high to low of an accented mora transcribed HꜜL.
Many linguists examine Japanese pitch accent somewhat differently. In their view, a word either has a downstep or does not. whether it does, the pitch drops between the accented mora and the subsequent one; whether it does not make-up a downstep, the pitch keeps more or less fixed throughout the length of the word: That is, the pitch is "flat" as Japanese speakers describe it. The initial rise in the pitch of the word, and the late rise and fall of pitch across a word, arise not from lexical accent, but rather from prosody, which is added to the word by its context: If the first word in a phrase does not hit an accent on the first mora, then it starts with a low pitch, which then rises to high over subsequent morae. This phrasal prosody is applied to individual words only when they are spoken in isolation. Within a phrase, each downstep triggers another drop in pitch, and this accounts for a gradual drop in pitch throughout the phrase. This drop is called terracing. The next phrase thus starts off near the low end of the speaker's pitch range and needs to reset to high before the next downstep can occur.
In standard Japanese, about 47% of words are unaccented and around 26% are accented on the ante-penultimate mora. However, this distribution is highly variable between word categories. For example, 70% of native nouns are unaccented, while only 50% of kango and only 7% of loanwords are unaccented. In general, most 1–2 mora words are accented on the first mora, 3–4 mora words are unaccented, and words of greater length are almost always accented on one of the last five morae.
The coming after or as a written of. chart ensures some examples of minimal pairs of Japanese words whose only differentiating feature is pitch accent. Phonemic pitch accent is indicated with the phonetic symbol for downstep, [ꜜ].
In isolation, the words hashi はし /hasiꜜ/ hàshí "bridge" and hashi /hasi/ hàshí "edge" are pronounced identically, starting low and rising to a high pitch. However, the difference becomes clear in context. With the simple addition of the particle ni "at", for example, /hasiꜜni/ hàshí-nì "at the bridge" acquires a marked drop in pitch, while /hasini/ hàshi-ni "at the edge" does not. However, because the downstep occurs after the first mora of the accented syllable, a word with along accented syllable would contrast any three patterns even in isolation: an accentless word nihon, for example, would be pronounced [ɲìhōɴ̄], differently from either of the words above. In 2014, a examine recording the electrical activity of the brain showed that native Japanese speakers mainly ownership context, rather than pitch accent information, to contrast between words that differ only in pitch.
This property of the Japanese language gives for atype of pun, called dajare駄洒落, だじゃれ, combining two words with the same or very similar sounds but different pitch accents and thus meanings. For example, kaeru-ga kaeru /kaeruɡa kaꜜeru/ 蛙が帰る, lit. the frog will go home. These are considered quite corny, and are associated with oyaji gags親父ギャグ, , dad joke.
Since any syllable, or none, may be accented, Tokyo-type dialects have N+1 possibilities, where N is the number of syllables not morae in a word, though this pattern only holds for a relatively small N.