2479: Swedish Tones Sep 25, 2021

While people tend to associate tonal languages which use pitch to distinguish between words otherwise pronounced the same with East Asia, there are languages around the world, such as Swedish (with Norwegian included), which also have some form of this. Swedish has two tones, the acute and grave tones, which are often distinguished by stress, as in English 'a rebel' and 'to rebel' but in Swedish there are genuine, noticeable pitch changes in terms of the individual vowels outside of mere stress. As a result, there are pairs of words differing only by these tones that have totally unrelated meanings, like 'boken' (the book) with acute tone, and 'boken' (spoilt) with a grave tone. In Swedish dialects spoken in Finland, these pitches are virtually nonexistent.