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Isochrony is the idea that a language rhythmically divides time into equal portions. Three types of divisions are postulated: 1) the temporal duration between two stressed syllables is equal (stress-timed); 2) The duration of every syllable is equal (syllable-timed); 3) the duration of every mora
Mora (linguistics)

Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight in some languages. Like many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies....
 is equal (mora-timed).

The idea was first expressed by Ken Pike in 1945. While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing, empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types, calling into question the validity of these types.






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Isochrony is the idea that a language rhythmically divides time into equal portions. Three types of divisions are postulated: 1) the temporal duration between two stressed syllables is equal (stress-timed); 2) The duration of every syllable is equal (syllable-timed); 3) the duration of every mora
Mora (linguistics)

Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight in some languages. Like many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies....
 is equal (mora-timed).

The idea was first expressed by Ken Pike in 1945. While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing, empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types, calling into question the validity of these types.

Syllable timing

In a syllable-timed language, every syllable is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time, though the absolute length of time depends on the prosody
Prosody (linguistics)

In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress , and intonation of connected speech . Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast, and focus ; or othe...
. Syllable-timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal stress.

Finnish
Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by Finnish people outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden....
, Slovene, French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 are commonly quoted as examples of syllable-timed languages. This type of rhythm was originally metaphorically referred to as 'machine-gun rhythm' because each underlying rhythmical unit is of the same duration, similar to the transient bullet noise of a machine-gun.

Since the 1950s speech scientists have tried to show the existence of equal syllable durations in the acoustic speech signal without success. More recent research claims that the duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals is responsible for syllable-timed perception.

Mora timing

Some languages such as Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
, Gilbertese or Luganda also have regular pacing, but are mora
Mora (linguistics)

Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight in some languages. Like many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies....
-timed rather than syllable-timed. In Japanese, a V or CV syllable takes up one timing unit. Japanese does not have long vowels or diphthong
Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
s but double vowels, so that CVV takes twice the time as CV. A final /N/ also takes as much time as a CV syllable, and at least in poetry, so does the extra length of a geminate consonant. However, colloquial language is less settled than poetic language, and the rhythm may vary from one region to another, or with time.

Stress timing

In a stress-timed language, syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables. Stress-timing is sometimes called Morse-code rhythm. Stress-timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes.

English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
, German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
, Dutch
Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic languages spoken by over 22 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is very small. Most native...
, Continental Portuguese
European Portuguese

European Portuguese refers to the variety of Portuguese language spoken in continental Portugal, as well in the Azores and Madeira islands. The word ?European? was chosen to avoid the clash of ?Portuguese Portuguese?....
, Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, and Czech
Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
 are typical stress-timed languages, as are some southern dialects of Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
.

See also

  • Weak form and strong form
    Weak form and strong form

    In the phonology of stress-timed languages, the weak form of a word is a form that may be used when the word has no stress, and which is phoneme distinct from the strong form, used when the word is stressed....


Further reading

  • Kono, Morio. (1997). "Perception and Psychology of Rhythm." Accent, Intonation, Rhythm and Pause. (Japanese)


External links

  • Roach, Peter (1998). , eds. L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, Penguin, 1998, pp. 150-8
  • (French
    French language

    French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
    )
  • Open-source software for automatically computing rhythm correlates