Karpiňski, Maciej; Andreeva, Bistra; Asu, Eva Liina; Beňuš, Štefan; Daugavet, Anna; Mády, Katalin
Central and Eastern Europe
Gussenhoven, Carlos; Chen, Aoju (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, Chap. 15, Oxford University Press, pp. 225-235, 2020, ISBN 9780198832232.
The languages of Central and Eastern Europe addressed in this chapter form a typologically divergent collection that includes Slavic (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, pluricentric Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Romance (Romanian). Their prosodic features and structures have been explored to various depths, from different theoretical perspectives, sometimes on the basis of relatively sparse material. Still, enough is known to see that their typological divergence as well as other factors contribute to vivid differences in their prosodic systems. While belonging to intonational languages, they differ in pitch patterns and their usage, duration, and rhythm (some involve phonological duration), as well as prominence mechanisms, accentuation, and word stress (fixed or mobile). Several languages in the area have what is referred to by different traditions as pitch accents, tones or syllable accents, or intonations.