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

• Syllable-timed language

This article is a stub and may need expanding. If you feel you can help improve it please click the "Edit" link at top to edit it. If you need help editing, simple guidance can be found here.

This message should only be placed on talk pages, not main namespace.