Title

In our third instillation on Japanese pronunciation, we will be going over two important features about it that make the language sound uniquely Japanese: pitch accent and vowel devoicing.

Rather than placing more stress on one syllable than another like in English, a word can have one or none of its morae accented. An accented mora will have a high pitch and then be followed by a pitch drop on the next mora. 

Although other dialects have different pitch-accent systems, learning Standard Japanese pitch accent will improve your fluency and improve your pronunciation scores if you're studying at school. In reality, though, no one would misunderstand you mean if you mess up the pitch of a word. So, it is not crucial that you master pitch accent right off the bat.   

There are four patterns in the Standard Japanese pitch-accent system.

1. Accent on the first mora: The pitch starts high then drops on the next mora, leveling out. 
2. Accent in the middle: The pitch rises, reaches a maximum at the accented mora(e), then drops. 
3. Accent on the last mora: The first mora of the word is low and all other morae are high. The pitch drop occurs on whatever is attached to the word. 
4. No accented mora: The first mora of the word is low and all other morae are high and pitch remains high on whatever is attached to the word.
   
   

※The Japanese names for these pitch accent patterns are what is mentioned in parentheses in the first column.

※For longer words that follow Pattern 2, the fall of the the pitch may not always fall on the second to last mora.

The four pitch patterns discussed do, in fact, help in distinguishing homophones (words that sound the same). To visualize this, the chart below lists groups of similar sounding words that are told apart by their pitch accent. 

To understand what is meant by voicing, place your fingers on your Adam's apple and pronounce any vowel. You'll notice that your throat vibrates: this is what voicing is. When a vowel is devoiced, it loses that vibration. 

The vowels /i/ and /u/ often become devoiced when  between or after the consonants /k/, /s/, /t/, and /p/. This is especially the case in low-pitched morae and in fast speech. When a vowel is devoiced in Japanese, it is either hardly there so long as the mouth is still articulated to pronounce it or deleted entirely. Deletion is most likely with the morae /shi/, /chi/, /hi/, /su/, /tsu/, or /fu/. Devoicing does not occur in single-mora words and it is more prevalent in male speech.