In this thesis, the production and perception of Swedish word accents by Somali L1 speakers is investigated. The Feature hypothesis, stating that it is easier to acquire a phonological feature in an L2 if the same phonological feature is used in the L1 will be the framework used. Somali is a language that also makes us of word accents. Therefore, the two languages are placed in the same level of the Tonal prominence hierarchy and the L2 acquisition of Swedish word accents by Somali L1 speakers is suitable to test. The production is tested by analyzing read speech, with elicited target words in focal position with either accent 1 or accent 2. The perception is tested with a discrimination test of the two word accents, and two different Swedish varieties are used: Central Swedish and South Swedish. Two groups are tested. One consists of Somali L1 speakers with Swedish L2 and one consists of speakers with both Somali and Swedish L1. The results show that the L2 group does make the distinction between A1 and A2 in the production test, but the result for the 2L1 group is less clear and can be interpreted as that they did not make use of the Swedish word accents. In the perception test, none of the two groups performed better than chance and had significantly lower scores than a Swedish L1 control group. The findings in this thesis confirm the Feature hypothesis in the production part, but contradict it in the perception part
