In search of word accents in Estonian Swedish

This study focuses on the word accent opposition in a lesser known and endangered variety of Swedish – Estonian Swedish. The variety has been described as not making the tonal distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 words, but no systematic acoustic phonetic investigation has been carried out previously to confirm these descriptions. As materials, disyllabic words from read sentences, spontaneous dialogues and elicited speech produced by nine elderly Estonian Swedish speakers were used. The comparison of tonal patterns of words with Accent 1 and Accent 2 showed that there is no consistent word accent opposition in this variety. However, some variation was found in the realisation of pitch contours in different speech styles, which might refer to possible traces of an earlier accent distinction.