Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
Although Hindi is a major world-language, with well over a hundred million speakers, the description of its prosodic features has been neglected. Like most other present-day Indo-European languages, it is a non-tone language, with sentence intonation and a stress accent. Stress occurs on syllables within words (word-stress) and on words within sentences (sentence-stress). By confining ourselves in the first instance to single-word utterances we may formulate some rules for word-stress, as a preliminary to a discussion of sentence-stress and intonation.