An Intonational Typology of Swedish

The aim of this paper is to present a suitable framework for the description of intonational variation within Swedish. The speech data base used mainly consists of natural spontaneous speech collected from a large number of varieties of Swedish within the project SweDia 2000. The intonational typology discussed takes into account both potentially cross-linguistic and more language and dialect specific features. The main parameters of this typology are within utterance intonation focal accentuation and phrasing, and in word intonation word accentuation and compounding. A tentative taxonomy of Swedish intonation with a further specification of these tonal parameters is devised. Within this framework seven distinct intonational dialect types of Swedish are accounted for, an extension of the number of intonational types from earlier typologies. Interrelationships between different tonal features of the taxonomy for the different dialect types are discussed.