Editing Serbo-Croatian (section)

=== Pitch accent ===
{{Further|Pitch accent#Serbo-Croatian|Serbo-Croatian phonology#Pitch accent}}

Apart from [[Slovene language|Slovene]], Serbo-Croatian is the only Slavic language with a [[pitch accent]] (simple [[Tone (linguistics)|tone]]) system. This feature is present in some other [[Indo-European languages]], such as [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]], [[Ancient Greek]], and [[Punjabi language|Punjabi]]. Neo-Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, which is used as the basis for standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, has four "accents", which involve either a [[Tone contour|rising or falling tone]] on either long or short vowels, with optional post-tonic lengths:

{| class="wikitable"
|+Serbo-Croatian accent system
|-
!Slavicist<br />symbol!![[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]]<br />symbol!!Description
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''e'''||{{IPA|[e]}}||align="left"|non-tonic short vowel
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''ē'''||{{IPA|[eː]}}||align="left"|non-tonic long vowel
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''è'''||{{IPA|[ě]}}||align="left"|short vowel with rising tone
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''é'''||{{IPA|[ěː]}}||align="left"|long vowel with rising tone
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''ȅ'''||{{IPA|[ê]}}||align="left"|short vowel with falling tone
|- style="text-align:center;"
|'''ȇ'''||{{IPA|[êː]}}||align="left"|long vowel with falling tone
|}

The tone stressed vowels can be approximated in English with ''set'' vs. ''setting?'' said in isolation for a short tonic ''e,'' or ''leave'' vs. ''leaving?'' for a long tonic ''i,'' due to the [[prosody (linguistics)|prosody]] of final stressed syllables in English.

General accent rules in the standard language:

# Monosyllabic words may have only a falling tone (or no accent at all – [[enclitic]]s);
# Falling tone may occur only on the first syllable of polysyllabic words;
# Accent can never occur on the last syllable of polysyllabic words.

There are no other rules for accent placement, thus the accent of every word must be learned individually; furthermore, in inflection, accent shifts are common, both in type and position (the so-called "[[mobile paradigm]]s"). The second rule is not strictly obeyed, especially in borrowed words.

Comparative and historical linguistics offers some clues for memorising the accent position: If one compares many standard Serbo-Croatian words to e.g. [[cognate]] Russian words, the accent in the Serbo-Croatian word will be one syllable before the one in the Russian word, with the rising tone. Historically, the rising tone appeared when the place of the accent shifted to the preceding syllable (the so-called "Neo-Shtokavian retraction"), but the quality of this new accent was different – its melody still "gravitated" towards the original syllable. Most Shtokavian (Neo-Shtokavian) dialects underwent this shift, but Chakavian, Kajkavian and the Old-Shtokavian dialects did not.

Accent diacritics are not used in the ordinary orthography, but only in the linguistic or language-learning literature (e.g. dictionaries, orthography and grammar books). However, there are very few [[minimal pair]]s where an error in accent can lead to misunderstanding.