Stress-timed language

A stress-timed language is a language in which the language stress falls on the content words of the language; its nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The other parts of speech — conjunctions, pronouns, modal verbs etc. are reduced to weak forms in order to not disrupt the flow of the stress timing.

Standard English is a stress-timed language, although the degree of stress-timing may vary with the accent used. For example, Noah Webster’s influence may have resulted in General American perhaps being less stress-timed than British English.

Currently the difference between a stress-timed language and a syllable-timed language is regarded to be a perception rather that a reality.