Secondary stress (or obsolete: secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the

pronunciation Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. To This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or all language in a specific dialect—"correct" or "standard" pronunciation—or si ...

of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called ''primary''. The

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the ''-nun-'' in (the higher vertical line denotes primary stress). Another tradition in English is to assign acute and

grave A grave is a location where a cadaver, dead body (typically that of a human, although sometimes that of an animal) is burial, buried or interred after a funeral. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of buria ...

accents for primary and secondary stress, respectively: ''pronùnciátion''. Most languages have at most one degree of stress on the

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

level ( English can contrast up to four levels of stress, that is, three degrees of stressed and one unstressed, according to some analyses). That is, each

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

has stress or it does not. Many languages have rhythmic stress; location of the stress may not be predictable, but when the location of one stressed syllable (which may be the primary stress) is known, certain syllables before or after can be predicted to also be stressed; these may have secondary stress. An example is Dutch, where the rule is that initial and final syllables (word boundaries) take secondary stress, then every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress, as long as two stressed syllables are not adjacent and stress does not fall on (there are, however, some exceptions to this rule). See . A similar rule applies in Romanian: secondary stress falls on every alternate syllable, starting with the first, as long as it does not fall adjacent to the primary stress. In other languages (including Egyptian Radio Arabic, Bhojpuri, Cayuga, Estonian, Hawaiian, Kaure,

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...

, and Warrgamay), secondary stress can be predicted to fall on heavy syllables. In other languages, the placement of secondary stress is not predictable, or may not be predictable (and thus be

) for some words. This is frequently posited for Germanic languages, including English. For example, secondary stress is said to arise in

compound word In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or Sign language, sign) that consists of more than one Word stem, stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. C ...

s like ''vacuum cleaner'', where the first syllable of ''vacuum'' has primary stress, while the first syllable of ''cleaner'' is usually said to have secondary stress. However, this analysis is problematic; notes that these may be cases of full vs reduced unstressed vowels being interpreted as secondary stress vs unstressed. See Stress and vowel reduction in English for details. In Norwegian, the

pitch accent A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (music), pitch (tone (linguistics), linguistic tone) rather than by vol ...

is lost from one of the roots in a compound word, but the erstwhile tonic syllable retains the full length (long vowel or geminate consonant) of a stressed syllable; this has sometimes been characterized as secondary stress.

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* Phonology Phonetics Stress (linguistics) {{phonetics-stub

See also

References

Bibliography