SYLLABLE-TIMED LANGUAGE

In every language, speech emission is based on a sequence of elementary sound units; some of them play a specific part: through their isochronic recurrence, they produce the rhythm of the sentences. In a 'syllable-timed language', these rhythm units are syllables.
However, such a classification should be used carefully, a spoken language being less settled than a written language; thus the way the rhythm is produced may vary from one region to another, or with time.
Spanish, Italian, French and Catalan are examples of syllable-timed languages. Romance languages are generally syllable-timed. An exception is European Portuguese, which is stress-timed. Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed. All Indian languages, such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Punjabi, etc are also syllable-timed languages. Korean and Chinese are also syllable-timed languages.

Contents

See also

External links

See also

★ Timing (linguistics)

★ Stress-timed language

★ Mora-timed language

External links

★ Étude sur la discrimination des langues par la prosodie (pdf document) (French)

★ Languages’ rhythm and language acquisition (pdf document)

★ Supra-segmental Phonology (rhythm, intonation and stress-timing)