How does pitch accent work in Japanese?

Question

My studies taught me there's two ways to say each mora in Japanese, with the way you normally talk and when you put a bit more emphasis on a mora, i.e. when someone says なつかしい, the word would be sounded out as na-tsu-ka-SHI-i.

I know only one dictionary that shows the way the words are emphasized (the Pocket Kenkyusha Japanese Dictionary), and I feel it uses overly complex terminology to get the point across. I want to able to put the principles into terms ordinary folks can understand, but every resource I have is either too complicated or tells me that the language doesn't put any emphasis on individual mora, which I know is totally wrong.

So, how does pitch accent work in Japanese?

Answer 1

You may be familiar with the concept of sentence-level pitch changes in English; for example when you are asking a question, you end the sentence with a rising pitch to indicate that it is indeed a question. Japanese also has sentence-level pitch changes, but more relevantly to this question, it has word-level pitch changes.

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Downstep Notation

In the standard (Tokyo) dialect, word pitch accents are realized by something called a "downstep". The pitch of a word increases until the downstep, at which point the pitch drops.

Downsteps happen strictly between kana (the linguistics term being "mora"), not in the middle of a kana.

These pitches can sometimes be used to distinguish words with the same spelling. The canonical example is はし which is three-way ambiguous between 箸, 橋 and 端.

These words can be disambiguated in speech as follows:

• 箸 (chopsticks) is はꜜし, namely the first kana must be pronounced high to facilitate the following drop
• 橋 (bridge) is はしꜜ, the first kana pronounced low, the second high to facilitate the drop before the following kana (e.g., a particle in the sentence) which would be pronounced low.
• 端 (edge) is はし, or "accentless", meaning that all characters are said at around the same pitch (including any following kana).

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"Binary" (LHL) Notation

You may see an alternate "binary" notation for pitch accents which is composed of a series of "L"s and "H"s. For example, you would notate the はし words as follows:

• 箸 (chopsticks) is HL(L)
• 橋 (bridge) is LH(L)
• 端 (edge) is LH(H)

However this notation is a little extraneous when it comes to succinctly marking the pitch accent of the word in the Tokyo dialect, because it always follows the pattern: start low (unless the downstep is right after the first kana), be high until the downstep, then stay low.

When discussing other dialects, sometimes more than just downsteps are required to analyze what is going on.

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Number Notation

To find pitch accents for Japanese words, I'd say the best online resource is 大辞林.

For example, the 大辞林 entry for 箸 says はし with a subscript "1" to its right.

It uses yet another notation, where the number works as follows:

• if the number is 0, it is an "accentless" word, i.e., does not have a downstep
• if there is no number, the downstep is placed after the last kana
• if it is any other number, the downstep is placed after that kana (hence 1 for 箸)

There is a nice picture relating this number notation to the binary notation provided by 三省堂, along with a number of example words.

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In the end, I'd say the downstep notation is the most succinct and expository notation when trying to notate standard Japanese pitch accent, but learning these other notations is useful to understand material about pitch accent.

Answer 2

I have made 2 videos that offer a general overview of the system (a third is yet to come):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeaLEC6KO20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWrmxYmdy4

You can also consult my page on pitch accent (which is also referenced in the Wikipedia article another user mentions), although it's still very much a work in progress:

http://learnlangs.com/japanesepitch/index.php?title=Main_Page

In general, Japanese does not put 'emphasis' on morae, a point which is particularly important for speakers of languages that assign stress to one syllable of every word. In contrast, pitch accent is a system that assigns patterns of high and low morae to lexical units, groups or phrases. But you'll learn all about that if you simply watch the videos.

Answer 3

You may find useful my Japanese phonetic converter:
http://easypronunciation.com/en/japanese-kanji-to-romaji-converter
Unlike other converters that just add furigana to Japanese text, my converter also displays the pitch accent in Japanese words.
Right now the converter doesn't support the inflected forms of verbs and adjectives, but I have plans to implement that in the future.
The output is available as romaji, kana and furigana.
Two types of styling for low and high morae are available:
1) different colors with adjusted vertical position,
2) overline.

Answer 4

Standard Japanese has what is known as a "downstep" accent rather than free pitch accent like some dialects (notably Kansai) have. Basically, the "accent" in the handbooks represents the last high syllable.

Thus, "na-tsu-ka-SHI-i" would be pronounced "na-TSU-KA-SHI-i". The downstep is after the "shi". The first syllable is always low unless a downstep immediately follows it; then the first syllable becomes the "last stressed syllable" and automatically becomes high.

Wikipedia has a nice explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

Answer 5

As is mentioned, it's usually na-TU-KA-SI-i (in the begining of a phrase) and as you say, when it's emphasized, it goes na-tu-ka-SI-i.