Stress-timed language

Template:Phonetics A stress-timed language is a language in which the language stress falls on the content words of the language - the 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 possibly being less stress-timed than British English.

See also

• Strong form
• Syllable-timed language
• Weak form

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