Stress-timed language

This is a Teflpedia phonetics article. For simplicity our articles are presently based on British English and received pronunciation. We understand other varieties exist, and trust teachers will adapt the information to their particular situation.

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 perhaps being less stress-timed than British English.

See also

• Strong form
• Syllable-timed language
• Weak form

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