Standard Croatian is a normatively described high-prestige dialect, which most Croatians in public life attempt to acquire, and which is taught in schools. It has four pitch accents, long/short rising/falling. We present acoustic and perceptual analyses of data from a wide range of speakers from different dialect backgrounds, showing that even for those with closely related native dialects with four accents, the established descriptions do not match productions -- for example, rising tones do not rise, and the moraic tonal structure does not agree. There is a wide range of accentuation from a tonal system with fourpitch-accents to a stress/dynamic system with one accent which is a shortstressed

Bradfield, Julian

Pletikos Olof, Elenmari

English

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Standard Croatian pitch-accents: fact and fictionCitation for published version:Pletikos Olof, E & Bradfield, J 2019, Standard Croatian pitch-accents: fact and fiction. in S Calhoun, PEscudero, M Tabain & P Warren (eds), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of PhoneticSciences ICPhS 2019. Australian Speech Science & Technology Association Inc, Canberra, Australia:Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., pp. 855-858, 19th International Congress ofPhonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 5/08/19. <https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/>Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Peer reviewed versionPublished In:Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2019General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 28. Nov. 2025STANDARD CROATIAN PITCH ACCENT: FACT AND FICTIONElenmari Pletikos Olof and Julian BradfieldUniversity of Zagreb and University of Edinburghepletiko@ffzg.hr, jcb@inf.ed.ac.ukABSTRACTStandard Croatian is a normatively described high-prestige dialect, which most Croatians in public lifeattempt to acquire, and which is taught in schools. Ithas four pitch accents, long/short rising/falling. Wepresent acoustic and perceptual analyses of data froma wide range of speakers from different dialect back-grounds, showing that even for those with closelyrelated native dialects with four accents, the estab-lished descriptions do not match productions – forexample, rising tones do not rise, and the moraictonal structure does not agree. There is a wide rangeof accentuation from a tonal system with four pitch-accents to a stress/dynamic system with one accentwich is a short stressed.Keywords: pitch accent, tone, acoustics, Croatian,word prosody1. INTRODUCTION‘Croatian’ is a group of South Slavic dialects spo-ken across present-day Croatia. The wider groupis called Serbo-croatian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian,etc., and language definitions are politically con-tentious. A distinctive feature of much of this dialectcontinuum is the use of pitch accents, documentedfor some five centuries.Croatian and Serbian have very similar (but notidentical) normative standard dialects, established inthe late 19th century, and based on a dialect of East-ern Herzegovina, which had a four-accent system,first described by Starčević in 1812. The modernnames, phonetic descriptions (following [5]), anddictionary notations of the accents are: short falling(SF), high tone on initial short stressed syllable andlow elsewhere ([dɔ́bar] dȍbar ‘good’); short rising(SR), high tone on short stressed syllable and the fol-lowing syllable ([dánás] dànas ‘today’); long falling(LF), falling tone on long stressed syllable ([dîːvan]dîvan ‘pretty’); long rising (LR), high tone on longstressed syllable continuing high into the followingsyllable ([dúːʃá] dúša ‘soul’). The high tone on thepost-accentual syllable has long been recognized asa key part of ‘rising’ accents. In the standard, longvowels can also occur (lexically) anywhere after theaccented syllable, but not before. Conflating vowellength with tone is traditional – phonologically itwould be usual to view length as a segmental qual-ity, and talk about two accents. However, given thelong tradition, and the prescriptive classification, theanalysis here is in terms of four accents.The four tones and other long vowels are markedin Croatian-published dictionaries, both monolin-gual and bilingual, but not in usual orthography.They are also not marked in school texts, thoughchildren are taught about them around age 12–13.The four-accent system is characteristic of mostŠtokavian dialects, covering 40–50% of Croatians,particularly in Dalmatia and Slavonia. The simi-larly populous Kajkavian dialects include that of thecapital, Zagreb, which has a simple dynamic stressaccent: as in English, the accent is marked by in-creased intensity, pitch and duration. Zagreb hasalso lost distinctive vowel length. The small Čaka-vian dialects are traditionally described with a dif-ferent three accent system, often including an ‘acute’[14] single syllable rising tone.Because of the high prestige of the standard, thereis a practice of teaching newsreaders, actors, teach-ers, etc. to speak it. Speaking the standard involvesusing the four-accent system with post-accentuallength.However, in practice acquiring the accent systemis difficult save for those who have it natively; andthe political importance of the capital region resultsin a strong influence of its native (Kajkavian, dy-namic accent) dialect on acceptability judgements.Hence ‘standard Croatian’ as it is actually spokenand accepted varies considerably from the normativeprescription. This paper presents acoustic data on therealization of accent in speakers intending to speakstandard Croatian.2. PREVIOUS WORK[5] described the four pitch accents in Novi SadSerbian (13 speakers) thus: accented syllables arelengthened; the main difference between F and Raccents is in pitch, while intensity is redundant; theterms ‘falling’ and ‘rising’ do not match phonetic re-alization of tonal contours – both F and R accentscan have a rising pitch in the stressed syllable; themain cue for distinguishing F and R is the higherpitch in the post-accentual syllable of R accents; andsentence intonation can influence the pitch enoughto neutralize lexical accent differences.[6] analysed recordings of three pitch-accentspeakers of standard Croatian (radio announcer, ac-tor and phonetician) and concluded that the main dif-ference from [5]’s description was that the contour inthe accented syllable of F accents is mostly declin-ing, and in R accents is mostly flat, and that the pitchof the postaccentual syllable in R accents is the sameas in the accented syllables rather than higher.[11] analysed productions by 3 Zagreb Croatianand 3 Belgrade Serbian speakers. Belgrade speakersdistinguished duration and tone giving four lexicalpitch accents, while Zagreb speakers did not havetone, and distinguished length only for some speak-ers when in narrow focus. For Belgrade speakerslate tonal alignment is a cue for R accents, and thusthe lexical difference, while for Zagreb speakers itcan be a cue for pragmatic conditions and for broadfocus or sentence-initial focus, with early alignmentfor narrow focus and final focus.[7] conducted a similar study to ours, with a sam-ple of 20 speakers. The results were consistent withour results, though perhaps owing to experimentalconditions all vowels were somewhat longer. Therewas no dialectal analysis of the speakers.Previous analyses had small sample sizes, and ei-ther chose one dialect, or did not distinguish speakerswithin ‘standard’. [4] argues that the Croatian ‘stan-dard’ is ‘unattainable’ by most Kajkavian speakers,and studies (by his own perceptual evaluation of16 TV interviews) the accommodations (e.g. stressshift) made by Zagreb speakers ‘speaking standard’.Standard Croatian accents are taught in elemen-tary schools at age 12–13 [2], which is too late forcritical period acquisition. Children with (regionalor parental) Štokavian exposure are better at produc-tion, but not at perception and recognition [9].The data and analyses presented here were origi-nally undertaken in the first author’s doctoral disser-tation [8], but not published. We have reviewed andrevised the analyses for publication here.3. RESEARCH QUESTIONThe original hypothesis for which the data was gath-ered was to test the claim of [10] that modern Stan-dard Croatian has only three accents. Following ini-tial results, the questionwas broadened to investigatewhat is the distribution of accent systems in standardCroatian.4. METHODOLOGYData is from 89 Croatian speakers, from all regionsand all major cities. Most were young females, re-flecting the student population. Most had some edu-cation in linguistics, phonetics or Croatian studies,with about one fifth from other subjects. Speak-ers self-evaluated their dialect background using thegenerally known division of Što-, Kaj- and Čaka-vian. After adjusting for their main residence, sixspeakers were mainly Čakavian, with the rest almostequally divided between Što- and Kajkavian.The task was to read, in ‘standard Croatian’, sen-tences with exemplars of the four standard accents,with and without post-accentual length. The 41 testwords were common, disyllabic with initial accent,and mostly with an open accented syllable. Theywere balanced in the accented vowel (/a e i o u/; vo-calic /r/ was not included). They were also balancedfor onset consonant manners of articulation. Theywere presented in orthography, underlined in a framethus: Reci dobar sada (say ‘dobar’ now). Speakerswere to read as if in a formal public setting such asTV or radio. They were not aware that the topic wasaccents. Sessions were recorded at 44.1kHz/16bitswith standard equipment in an acoustic studio.Tokens were presented (without the frame) to apanel of four expert accentologists for perceptualevaluation, who classified them as one of the fourstandard accents, or as ‘other’ with a description.After classifying tokens, evaluators assigned eachspeaker to one of the three dialects, or to unclear,with a Likert scale from clearly dialectal to stan-dard. This classification had generally good agree-ment with the information from self-assessment andbiography.Acoustic analysis was done in Praat [1]. The ac-centual and post-accentual nuclei were measured forduration, and for intensity and F0 at each tenth ofthe vowel duration. F0 data was normalized relativeto each token’s baseline and expressed in semitones.Statistical analysis (with SPSS) is mostly one-wayANOVA to test for differences between groups ofdata.5. RESULTSFor clarity, we use the terms ‘LR-tokens, R-tokens,rising-tokens’ etc. to mean ‘tokens of words that arenormatively LR, have a rising accent’, etc. ‘Tonic’means ‘normatively accented syllable’, and ‘post-tonic’ means the following syllable. We omit heredata for and discussion of post-accentual length.5.1. Overall perceptual analysis by evaluatorsOwing to the speakers who did not in fact have thepitch accent system, the evaluators (who were listen-ing for ‘standard’ accents) heard more (121%) ‘shortfalling’ than just the SF-tokens, as SF is similar tothe dynamic stress accent: a slightly lengthened,raised-pitch stressed syllable. Correspondingly,short rising is heavily under-represented at 39% ofthe number of SR-tokens, as the SR tune of two highpitches is not found in dynamic accents. Likewise51% for long rising, and 61% for long falling.Around a quarter of tokens were not labelled in thefour accent system, being described as half-long,stress, long stress, flat or mixes thereof.5.2. Analysis into accent groupsFollowing token classification, the first author anal-ysed each speaker for the number of distinct accentsthey produced. Of the 89 speakers, 36 had a clearfour-accent system (the T(onal) group), 30 speakersappeared to have a dynamic accent (the D(ynamic)group), and 23 appeared to be transitional, with twoor three accents, always neutralizing the SF/SR dis-tinction (the D/T group). (The three-accent systemwas claimed by [10] to be the current standard, andhe named it ‘Croatian Received Pronunciation’.)Of the 36 T speakers, 7 were heard as Dalmatian,20 as Slavonian, and 9 from elsewhere or unclear.Of the 30D speakers, only 4 had the Zagreb regionsystem of pure dynamic accent and no length dis-tinction, of whom 3 were from Zagreb. 15 speakersfrom a range of cities including Zagreb had a clearL/S distinction, but no R/F distinction, and are heardas dynamic accent speakers with a length contrast.11 speakers were indeterminate.The most interesting group is the 23 transitionalspeakers, who came from all three major dialects.7 geographically distributed speakers had a clear 3-accent system, where SR is merged into SF, butthe LR/LF distinction is robust. The remaining 16speakers had a clear L/S distinction, but a LR/LFdistinction that was sporadically realized. Moreover,the LR realization is not quite the standard Štokavianaccent, but more dynamic than tonal.5.3. Acoustic analysisAn overview of the acoustics is given in Figure 1.This displays the average pitch contours for the fournormative accents, as realized by each of the threegroups, i.e. the solid line for LR is the average con-tour over all LR-tokens pronounced by T speakers.‘Eyeball analysis’ suggests that the only large dif-Figure 1: Accent productions by speaker group0 50 100 150 200 250−0.4−0.20time/msPitch/octaveLong Falling0 50 100 150 200 250−0.20Long Rising0 50 100 150 200 250−0.4−0.20Short Falling0 50 100 150 200 250−0.4−0.20Short RisingT(onal) D(ynamic) D/T(ransitional)ference between groups is the clear rising accent inT speakers. However, statistical analysis gives aslightly more nuanced picture.The T speakers all had the greatest length contrast,averaging 161ms for LF-tokens and 150ms for LRversus 110ms for SF/SR. S-tokens were similar inlength for all speakers. For L-tokens, D speakers av-eraged 140/133ms for LF/LR, but this includes the 4speakers without a length distinction; nonetheless, Dspeakers with length have significantly shorter vow-els than T speakers. The D/T speakers were exactlyintermediate in length on average, but this appears tobe due to sporadic realization of length rather thanshorter long vowels. For both the T and D/T speak-ers, the 10ms difference between LF and LR lengthsis significant at p < 0.001. For all speakers and ac-cents, the post-tonic vowel is much shorter, at 70ms.For the T speakers, the post-tonic is slightly but sig-nificantly (p < 0.001) longer for R than for F: 10mslonger for SR, 5ms for LR. For D speakers, this ef-fect is smaller (3ms) and barely reaches significance(p = 0.05); and D/T are intermediate.Turning to the tonal aspect, the T speakers showthree different contour patterns: SR and LR have thesame shape, differing only in length, whereas theLF falls more on the tonic than the SF does. Asexpected, D speakers have no distinctions of tonalcontour. The D/T speakers display a reduced ver-sion of the T pattern, in which the LF has a steeperfall, but LR/SR/SF are not significantly distinguish-able in contour. The pitch of the post-tonic variesmore (2–3 semitones SD) than the tonic (less than1 semitone). Post-hoc statistics of dependent vari-ables such as tonal range of the tonic vowel agree,with the difference between SR and LR ranges be-ing only borderline significant at p = 0.051, whileother differences are highly significant (p < 0.001).On the other hand, the ratio of the average post-tonicpitch to the average tonic pitch significantly distin-guishes between LR, SR, and F, even though the ab-solute LR/SR difference is small.A notable feature of the acoustic data is that the Rtonics are not only not rising, they are even slightlyfalling: in the 5-level notation, the R tones areroughly 55.53, SF is 54.21, and LF is 52.11. Previ-ously R tonics have been observed to be barely risingor slightly circumflex ([5, 3]), though [13, 12] reportsome Serbian speakers with slightly falling R tonics.For intensity (not graphed), in most cases the post-tonic is about 7dB quieter than the tonic, but for Tspeakers it is only 3dB quieter in the R accents, asignificant difference.Despite the clear difference between T and Dspeakers, one may ask whether the ‘standard Croa-tian population’ as a whole displays enough differ-entiation to sustain four accents. The T speakers doindeed have enough representation (40–50% of bothsample and general population) that an overall aver-age displays the highly significant differences foundin the T speakers, albeit with a smaller effect size.6. CONCLUSIONOn a substantial sample, we have shown that con-temporary ‘standard Croatian’ still has (contra [10])a robust four-pitch-accent system for about a third ofits speakers, while another third use a stress accent,and a sizable intermediate population uses a mixedsystem with two accents similar to the dynamic longand short, plus a distinctive long falling accent takenfrom the tonal system.The most controversial statement about „standardCroatian“, as defined by [10], is that the three-accentsystem is widespread, and consists of SF, LF, LR.Our results confirm the existence of three-accent pat-terns in transitional D/T systems, but it is not thewidest spread, and in words where the standard pre-scribes the LR, D/T systems have a long accentedsillable with a low tone on post-tonic, which is not aLR as in the tonal system, but a long stressed syllablewe may call ‘dynamic long’. Dynamic long has thesame tonal pattern (H.L) as short falling, but it has along stressed syllable with a flat high tone.7. REFERENCES[1] Boersma, P., Weenink, D. 2007–. Praat: doing pho-netics by computer.[2] Gusak Bilić, I., Alerić, M., Vlašić Duić, J. 2018.Teaching word stress patterns in primary school.Croatian Journal of Education 20(Sp.Ed.2), 21–44.[3] Ivić, P., Lehiste, I. 2002. O srpskohrvatskim akcen-tima. Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića.[4] Kapović, M. 2018. The unattainable standard – Za-greb dialect meets Standard Croatian accentuation.Int. J. Slavic Studies 7(1), 337–362.[5] Lehiste, I., Ivić, P. 1986. Word and sentenceprosody in Serbocroatian. MIT Press.[6] Pletikos, E. 2003. Akustički opis hrvatskih stan-dardnih naglasaka. Govor XX(1–2), 321–346.[7] Pletikos, E., Vlašić, J. 2007. Acoustic descriptionof Croatian accents. Studia Phonetica Posnaniensia8, 27–49.[8] Pletikos Olof, E. 2008. Akustički Opis HrvatskeProzodije Riječi. PhD thesis University of Zagreb.[9] Pletikos Olof, E., Vlašić Duić, J., Martinović, B.2016. Metode mjerenja naglasnih kompetencija.Metodologija i primjena lingvističkih istraživanja.Zbornik radova s međunarodnoga znanstvenogskupa Hrvatskoga društva za primijenjenu lingvis-tiku održanoga od 24. do 26. travnja 2015. godineu Zadru. Srednja Europa 293–307.[10] Škarić, I. 2007. Fonetika hrvatskoga književnogajezika. In: Babić, S., Brozović, D., Škarić, I., Težak,S., (eds), Glasovi i oblici hrvatskoga književnogajezika. Nakladni zavod Globus 17–157.[11] Smiljanić, R. 2004. Lexical, pragmatic and posti-tional effects on prosody in two dialects of Croatianand Serbian: an acoustic study. Routledge.[12] Sredojević, D. 2017. Fonetsko-fonološki opis ak-cenata u standardnom srpskom jeziku -– od speci-fičnog ka opštem. Filozofski fakultet.[13] Sredojević, D., Subotić, L. 2011. The neo-Štokavian accent shift and the phonological signifi-cance of suprasegmental features in different Štoka-vian dialects. acoustic and phonetic analysis. Bal-tistica Supplement VII, 227–242.[14] Vlašić Duić, J., Pletikos Olof, E. 2014. Akustičkeposebnosti akuta u čakavskom, kajkavskom istaroštokavskom govoru. Sarajevski filološki sus-reti II : Zbornik radova 21–44.

Standard Croatian pitch-accents: fact and fiction

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Standard Croatian pitch-accents: fact and fiction

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