L'interface est traduite, mais les explications de cette page sont encore rédigées en anglais — le texte pédagogique n'a pas encore été traduit.
La partie qui ne s'écrit pas
Chaque langue se sert de la hauteur, de l'intensité et du minutage pour quelque chose — mais pas pour la même chose. En cantonais et en mandarin, la hauteur est lexicale : elle appartient au mot. En anglais, espagnol, italien et allemand, c'est l'accent tonique qui change les mots. En géorgien, la hauteur ne fait ni l'un ni l'autre — elle marque les questions, et rien d'autre. En français, il n'y a pas d'accent de mot du tout. C'est en se trompant sur cette couche qu'une phrase aux voyelles parfaites sonne encore étrangère.
| Langue | La hauteur… | L'accent… | Rythme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Georgian | marque seulement les questions | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed, heavy clusters |
| English | intonation seulement | change les mots | Stress-timed |
| French | intonation seulement | rien — pas d'accent de mot | Syllable-timed |
| Spanish | intonation seulement | change les mots | Syllable-timed |
| Portuguese | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Stress-timed (Portugal) |
| Italian | intonation seulement | change les mots | Syllable-timed + long consonants |
| German | intonation seulement | change les mots | Stress-timed |
| Malay | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed |
| Japanese | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Mora-timed |
| Russian | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Stress-timed, heavily reduced |
| Hindi | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed, with deletion |
| Mandarin | porte le mot (ton) | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed |
| Cantonese | porte le mot (ton) | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed |
| Vietnamese | porte le mot (ton) | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed, one tone per syllable |
| Korean | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed, phrase melody |
| Turkish | intonation seulement | rien de distinctif | Syllable-timed, rising to the end |
Georgian — No tone at all — pitch is reserved for asking questions
Hauteur
Georgian is not tonal: no word changes meaning because of its pitch. Pitch does one job instead, and it is a big one — a yes/no question is marked by INTONATION ALONE. Georgian does not invert the word order, has no question particle like Mandarin 吗, and keeps the same words in the same order; the sentence simply rises at the end. Get the intonation wrong and a question becomes a statement.
Accent
Weak and non-contrastive. Two-syllable words take it on the first syllable; longer words tend toward the third-from-last. No pair of Georgian words is distinguished by stress alone, which is why dictionaries do not mark it. To an English ear Georgian can sound evenly stressed, almost flat — that is correct, not a lack of expression.
Rythme
Syllable-timed-ish, with famously heavy consonant clusters (გვფრცქვნი) that take time to get through without inserting vowels. The vowels never reduce to schwa the way English ones do.
L'entendre
Le bouton ◈ est le synthétiseur qui trace directement la courbe de hauteur — mêmes mots, mélodie différente, et c'est précisément le but. ▶ utilise une vraie voix si votre appareil en a une.
| Schéma | Phrase | Ce qu'il faut écouter | Écouter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statement — falling | ის მოდის. is modis. | "He is coming." The pitch settles down at the end. | |
| Question — rising | ის მოდის? is modis? | "Is he coming?" Same words, same order — only the final rise makes it a question. | |
| Question word — falling | ვინ მოდის? vin modis? | With a question word (ვინ 'who') the rise is not needed — it falls, like a statement. English does the same: "Who's coming?" does not rise. |
English — Stress is spelling — move it and you change the word
Hauteur
No lexical tone, but intonation carries an enormous amount: rise for yes/no questions, fall for statements and wh-questions, and a whole grammar of contrast ('I didn't say SHE took it').
Accent
Contrastive, and unmarked in writing — the single most common cause of not being understood. Dozens of noun/verb pairs differ only in where the stress goes, and every unstressed vowel collapses to /ə/.
Rythme
Stress-timed: stressed syllables come at roughly even intervals and everything between them is squeezed. This is why 'a cup of tea' becomes /ə kʌp ə ˈtiː/ and why learners who give every syllable equal weight sound wrong even with perfect vowels.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| record a record (noun) — REcord “That is a new record.” | record to record (verb) — reCORD “I want to record this.” | Same six letters. Stress on the first syllable = the thing; on the second = the action. The rule holds for dozens of pairs. |
| present a present (noun) — PREsent “She gave me a present.” | present to present (verb) — preSENT “I will present the results.” | Also: object / object, contract / contract, permit / permit, increase / increase. |
| desert desert (the sand) — DEsert “They crossed the desert.” | dessert dessert (the pudding) — desSERT “We had ice cream for dessert.” | Spelled differently, but the difference you HEAR is which syllable is strong. |
Les paires qui partagent une orthographe sont jouées dans une phrase — une voix qui lit le mot nu doit deviner lequel vous vouliez, exactement comme un lecteur.
French — No word stress at all — the group is the unit
Hauteur
Intonation only, at the level of the phrase. A yes/no question can be marked by a final rise alone (Tu viens ?), which is why the rise matters more in French than the est-ce que you were taught.
Accent
This is the one that surprises everyone: French words have NO fixed stress. Prominence lands on the last syllable of the rhythmic GROUP, not of the word — so the same word is stressed differently depending on where it sits. 'Un chocolat' stresses -lat; 'un chocolat chaud' moves it to chaud and the word chocolat loses it entirely. There are no French minimal pairs by stress, because there is nothing to contrast.
Rythme
Syllable-timed: every syllable takes roughly the same time and vowels do not reduce. Hearing a French speaker give equal weight to English syllables — and an English speaker stress the first syllable of French words — is this difference in both directions.
Regardez l'accent se déplacer
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| un chocolat stress on the LAST syllable of the group: choco-LAT | un chocolat chaud the group grew — now it is choco-lat-CHAUD | The word did not change; the group did. This is why 'French has stress on the last syllable' is a half-truth — it is the last syllable of the phrase. |
Spanish — Stress is contrastive — and the written accent tells you where
Hauteur
No lexical tone. Intonation marks questions, helped by the opening ¿ so you know a rise is coming before you start reading aloud.
Accent
Fully contrastive, and mercifully written: if a word breaks the default pattern (stress on the second-to-last syllable for vowel/-n/-s endings, on the last otherwise) it carries an accent. Three-way minimal sets are common and the accent is the only thing separating them.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, with five pure vowels that never reduce — the clarity that makes Spanish easy to hear and hard to speak fast.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| término term (noun) — TÉR-mi-no | terminó he/she finished — ter-mi-NÓ “Él terminó el trabajo.” | And in the middle: termino 'I finish'. Three words, one spelling skeleton, three stress positions. |
| papa potato / the Pope | papá dad | One syllable of difference in prominence, and you have changed the subject entirely. |
| hablo I speak | habló he/she spoke | Present or past, decided by stress. This pattern runs through the whole verb system. |
Portuguese — Stress is contrastive, and unstressed vowels get eaten
Hauteur
No lexical tone. Intonation carries questions on its own — Portuguese changes nothing else about the sentence, so the rise is doing all the work.
Accent
Contrastive and written. The default is the second-to-last syllable; anything else takes an accent, and the accent also picks between open and close vowels — avó /ɔ/ is a grandmother and avô /o/ is a grandfather.
Rythme
This is where European and Brazilian Portuguese part company, and it is most of why they sound unrelated. European Portuguese is strongly stress-timed: unstressed e collapses to /ɨ/ and is often deleted outright, so pequeno comes out closer to p'queno and the language sounds clipped and consonant-heavy. Brazilian keeps its unstressed vowels open and lands much nearer syllable-timed, which is why it sounds slower and more musical to most ears.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| sabia he/she knew — sa-BI-a | sábia wise (f) — SÁ-bi-a “Ela era uma mulher sábia.” | And a third: sabiá, a thrush, stressed on the last. Three words, one spelling skeleton, three stress positions — exactly the Spanish término/termino/terminó pattern. |
| avô grandfather — close o | avó grandmother — open ó | Not stress but vowel quality, and the accent is the only thing marking it. Getting this wrong in a family conversation is a rite of passage. |
| falamos we speak (present) | falámos we spoke (past, Portugal) | Portugal marks the past with an accent; Brazil writes both the same and relies on context. |
Italian — Stress is contrastive but usually unwritten — you learn it per word
Hauteur
No lexical tone; intonation does questions, and Italian leans on it heavily since word order often does not change.
Accent
Contrastive. The default is the second-to-last syllable, and the accent is only written when the stress falls on the LAST one (città, perché). Words stressed on the third-from-last (àncora, prìncipi) are common and unmarked — the dictionary is the only way to know.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, with the extra wrinkle that double consonants are genuinely held longer (palla vs pala) — length is doing work here that stress does elsewhere.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| ancora again / still — an-CO-ra | àncora anchor — ÀN-co-ra | The famous pair. Both are spelled ancora in normal writing; only context and stress separate them. |
| principi principles — prin-CÌ-pi | principi princes — PRÌN-ci-pi | Identical in print. You are expected to work it out from the sentence. |
| capitano captain — ca-pi-TA-no | capitano they happen — ca-PÌ-ta-no | A noun or a verb, decided entirely by which syllable you lean on. |
German — Stress decides whether the prefix leaves the verb
Hauteur
No lexical tone. Intonation marks questions, but German also inverts the verb, so the rise is doing less work than in Georgian or French.
Accent
Contrastive in a very German way: with separable-vs-inseparable prefix verbs, the stress tells you which grammar you are in — and therefore what the sentence means. Otherwise stress sits on the stem syllable, and the unstressed prefixes (be-, ge-, er-, ver-, zer-, ent-) never take it.
Rythme
Stress-timed like English, with strong reduction in unstressed syllables (-en → /n̩/) and a glottal stop before vowel-initial words that gives German its clipped edge: 'am Abend' = /am ˈʔaːbn̩t/.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| Er fährt das Schild um. ÚMfahren — he knocks the sign over (separable, stress on um-) | Er umfährt das Schild. umFÁHREN — he drives around the sign (inseparable, stress on -fährt) | The same verb, opposite outcomes for the sign. Stress is the only spoken clue — and it is why the prefix physically moves in one and not the other. |
| Ich übersetze den Text. überSÉTZEN — I translate the text | Ich setze über. ÜBERsetzen — I ferry across | Same pattern: unstressed prefix = figurative and inseparable; stressed prefix = literal and separable. |
Malay — Nothing hidden — no tone, and stress that never changes a word
Hauteur
No lexical tone. Questions are marked by particles (-kah) or plain intonation; the rise is optional rather than load-bearing.
Accent
Light and non-contrastive, usually on the second-to-last syllable — and it shifts when suffixes are added, without any effect on meaning. No Malay pair is distinguished by stress, which is one of the reasons Malay is regularly called the most approachable major language to pronounce.
Rythme
Syllable-timed and even. Combined with a small sound inventory and no consonant clusters, this is why Malay is easy to hear accurately from day one.
Japanese — Pitch ACCENT — not tone, but it still changes words
Hauteur
Japanese sits between the tone languages and the stress languages, and gets its own name for it: pitch accent. A word has at most ONE place where the pitch drops, and where that drop falls is part of the word. 箸 hashi (drop after ha) is chopsticks; 橋 hashi (drop after shi) is a bridge; 端 hashi (no drop) is the edge. Unlike Cantonese there is no contour to learn per syllable — only 'where does it fall, if at all'. Tokyo and Osaka disagree about the answer for many words, and both are correct.
Accent
No stress in the English sense — syllables are not louder or longer, so a Japanese speaker reading English tends to flatten it, and an English speaker reading Japanese tends to hammer syllables that should be even.
Rythme
MORA-timed, not syllable-timed: every beat gets equal time, and ん, っ and the second half of a long vowel are each a full beat of their own. とうきょう Tōkyō is four beats; きって kitte 'stamp' is three, and kite (kite 'come') is two — different words. This is the single most important thing to get right, ahead of any vowel.
L'entendre
Le bouton ◈ est le synthétiseur qui trace directement la courbe de hauteur — mêmes mots, mélodie différente, et c'est précisément le but. ▶ utilise une vraie voix si votre appareil en a une.
| Schéma | Phrase | Ce qu'il faut écouter | Écouter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 箸 hashi — chopsticks (drop after HA) | はし hashi | High then low. Tokyo speakers call this 頭高 atamadaka, 'head-high'. | |
| 橋 hashi — bridge (drop after SHI) | はし hashi | Low then high — and the drop lands on the particle that follows: hashi GA. | |
| 端 hashi — edge (no drop) | はし hashi | Flat: the accentless pattern 平板 heiban. Three identical syllables, three words. |
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| きって kitte — stamp (3 beats: ki-t-te) | きて kite — come! (2 beats: ki-te) | The っ is a full beat of silence. Skip it and you have asked for a different word entirely — length, not stress, is doing the work. |
| おばあさん obāsan — grandmother (5 beats) | おばさん obasan — aunt (4 beats) | One extra beat of vowel. Getting it wrong ages someone by a generation. |
Russian — Stress is unwritten, unpredictable, and decides which vowels survive
Hauteur
No lexical tone. Intonation carries questions entirely on its own — Russian changes no words and moves nothing — with a sharp rise on the stressed syllable of whatever is being asked about, then a fall. Move the rise and you change the question.
Accent
Contrastive, and NOT written. За́мок is a castle and замо́к is a lock. Worse, it moves within a word’s own declension — рука́ but ру́ку, окно́ but о́кна — so knowing the word is not the same as knowing where to hit it. Dictionaries mark it; native writing does not.
Rythme
Strongly stress-timed, and the reduction is severe. Unstressed о and а both collapse to /ɐ/, and further from the stress to /ə/; unstressed е and я go to /ɪ/. хорошо́ has three о and three different vowels — /xərɐˈʃo/ — which is the single clearest demonstration of the system. A learner who gives every written vowel its full value is instantly identifiable, and this is what most foreign accents in Russian actually consist of.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| за́мок castle — ZÁ-mok | замо́к lock — za-MÓK “На двери замо́к.” | Identical letters. Only the stress separates them, and the writing marks nothing. |
| писа́ть to write | п́исать — an obscenity | The reason stress is worth taking seriously. Textbooks mark this one. |
| рука́ hand (nominative) | ру́ку hand (accusative) | Same word, and the stress jumps when the case changes. This happens throughout the declension and has to be learnt per word. |
Hindi — Stress follows syllable weight — and the vowel you do not write disappears
Hauteur
No lexical tone, unlike its neighbour Punjabi, which developed one. Pitch does intonation, and क्या at the front of a sentence marks a question so the rise is optional.
Accent
Not contrastive and not written. Stress falls on the heaviest syllable — a long vowel or a closed syllable outweighs a short open one — and where several are equal it goes to the last of them. No two Hindi words are told apart by stress alone, which makes it the least stressful stress system here.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, but with a twist no other language on this site has. Every Devanagari consonant carries an inherent अ /ə/ unless something removes it — and in modern Hindi that vowel is DELETED in predictable places, usually word-finally and between certain consonants. So कमरा is written ka-ma-raa and said kam-raa; नमस्ते is na-ma-s-te and said na-mas-te. The script records an older pronunciation and the reader is expected to know which vowels have since gone. Sanskrit keeps them all, which is why chanted Sanskrit sounds so different from spoken Hindi.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| कमरा room — written ka-ma-raa, said KAM-raa | कमल lotus — written ka-ma-l, said KA-mal | Schwa deletion, and it is not optional. A learner who pronounces every written अ sounds like someone reading Sanskrit aloud. |
| नमस्ते hello — na-mas-te, not na-ma-s-te | रामायण Ramayana — raa-maa-yan, not raa-maa-ya-na | The final अ goes almost everywhere. This is why Hindi names lose a syllable that Sanskrit keeps: राम is Raam, not Rama. |
Mandarin — Pitch is lexical — see the tone lab
🎵 Ici, la hauteur appartient au mot. Ouvrir le laboratoire de tons →
Hauteur
Four tones plus a neutral one; the pitch IS part of the word. Intonation still exists on top (a question can raise the whole phrase) but it can never overwrite a tone.
Accent
Stress is a matter of length and clarity rather than pitch: a stressed syllable holds its full tone, an unstressed one goes neutral and short.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, one syllable per character, with tone sandhi reshaping sequences (third + third → second + third).
Cantonese — Pitch is lexical — see the tone lab
🎵 Ici, la hauteur appartient au mot. Ouvrir le laboratoire de tons →
Hauteur
Six pitch shapes (nine traditional categories). Because the tone space is already crowded, Cantonese leans on sentence-final particles rather than intonation to carry mood — 呀, 喇, 咩, 囉 do the job a rising pitch does in English.
Accent
No contrastive stress; prominence comes from particles and from changed tone (變調) lifting a syllable to tone 2.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, with checked syllables (-p -t -k) noticeably shorter than open ones.
Vietnamese — Pitch is lexical, and the spelling writes it — see the tone lab
🎵 Ici, la hauteur appartient au mot. Ouvrir le laboratoire de tons →
Hauteur
Six tones in the north, and every one of them is written: the mark on the vowel IS the tone (ma, mà, má, mả, mã, mạ are six words). Two of the six are made with the throat as much as with pitch — ngã breaks in the middle and nặng is cut off short — so a Vietnamese tone is a shape plus a voice quality, not a note. Intonation still rides on top for questions and emphasis, but it can never overwrite the tone: a question is asked with a particle (không?, à?) rather than with a rise.
Accent
No lexical stress. Every syllable carries its own tone and its own full vowel, and none is reduced. What sounds like stress to an English ear is a syllable holding its tone longer or louder for emphasis, and grammatical words (đã, sẽ, được) being said lighter and faster than content words.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, and unusually evenly so: every syllable is written as a separate word, is one beat long, and ends either open or in a clipped, unreleased consonant. The clipped endings (-p, -t, -c, -ch) and the two glottalised tones give it a staccato that sounds abrupt to European ears and is simply the rhythm of the language.
Korean — No tone, no stress — the melody belongs to the phrase
Hauteur
Not tonal, and not a pitch-accent language either in the standard: Seoul Korean gives its pitch to the PHRASE, not the word. Each accentual phrase rises over its first two syllables and falls at the end (low-high … high-low), and the very first syllable starts higher after an aspirated or tense consonant than after a plain one — which is how listeners tell 달 from 탈 at the start of a phrase. Questions rise at the end, as in English. The Busan and Daegu dialects DO have lexical pitch accent (가지 is 'branch' or 'aubergine' by pitch there), which is why southerners sound sing-song to Seoul.
Accent
None at word level. No syllable is reduced and no vowel becomes a schwa; every syllable is said in full. What an English ear hears as stress is the phrase-initial rise.
Rythme
Syllable-timed, with a strong tendency to even length, and every syllable ending either in a vowel or in one of seven unreleased consonants (ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅇ). The sound changes between syllables — nasalisation, tensing, liaison — keep the stream smooth: a Korean sentence has fewer audible consonant clusters than its spelling suggests.
Turkish — Stress at the end of the word — until a suffix or a place name says otherwise
Hauteur
Not tonal. The stressed syllable is marked by a rise in pitch more than by loudness, which is why Turkish sounds even and melodic to an English ear. A yes/no question carries the particle mı/mi/mu/mü, and the pitch peak lands on the syllable just BEFORE it — on the word being asked about: Ahmet mi geldi? 'Was it AHMET who came?' against Ahmet geldi mi? 'Did Ahmet COME?'. The particle moves, and the melody moves with it.
Accent
Regular by default: the last syllable, and it travels rightwards as suffixes are added (kiTAP, kitapLAR, kitaplarDAN). The exceptions are what make it a real system. Place names are stressed early, on a pattern borrowed from their shape (ANkara, İsTANbul, İZmir); many adverbs and old loans stay on the first syllable (ŞIMdi, YArın, LOkanta); and some suffixes refuse the stress and push it onto the syllable before them — the negative -me-/-ma- above all, so that the same letters can be a noun or a command.
Rythme
Syllable-timed: unstressed vowels keep their full quality, nothing reduces to a schwa, and long words built from many suffixes are said at an even pace, each bead of the chain getting its beat. Vowel harmony makes those chains sound internally rhymed — evlerimizden 'from our houses' is all front vowels, okullarımızdan 'from our schools' all back ones.
Paires minimales par l'accent
| L'un | L'autre | Pourquoi ça compte |
|---|---|---|
| yazma yazMA — writing; a printed headscarf (noun, final stress) | yazma YAZma — don't write! (the negative -ma pushes the stress back) | Identical letters. The negative suffix never takes the stress, so the command is stressed on the root and the noun on its last syllable. |
| bebek beBEK — a baby | Bebek BEbek — the Istanbul neighbourhood on the Bosphorus | Place names are stressed early. The same word becomes a district the moment the stress moves. |
| okuma okuMA — reading (noun) | okuma oKUma — don't read! | The same pattern on a three-syllable verb: the stress sits on the syllable just before -ma. |
Pourquoi cette page existe
Tout est parti d'une demande de laboratoire de tons pour le géorgien. Le géorgien n'a pas de tons — mais il a un système prosodique qui mérite une page : c'est la seule langue ici où une question fermée est marquée par la hauteur et rien d'autre. Démêler quelles langues utilisent la hauteur pour les mots, lesquelles utilisent l'accent, et lesquelles ni l'un ni l'autre s'est révélé plus utile que de faire comme si elles faisaient toutes pareil.