In addition to the sounds described above, most languages use supersegmental features which vary the volume (loudness), musical pitch and timing of sounds. We'll describe them in that order.

Stress

English is a good example of a language with stress: some syllables are pronounced louder, at higher pitch and held longer than they otherwise would be. English words usually have one stressed syllable : the native stress falls on the first syllable of a word, but imported words often have stress on the next-to-last (penultimate) syllable. "Small" words like articles and common prepositions and conjunctions often have no stress, as if they were part of the surrounding words.

In Shwa, stressed vowels are written high, hanging from the top of the line. To type them, you press the vowel key, followed by the Space key (while for low vowels you press Space before the vowel sign).

Here's how high vowels are used :

• In languages with no tone and fixed stress, like French, the vowel of the last full syllable in a stress group is written high, and other vowels are written low.
• In languages with a (free) stress accent, like English, Spanish or Russian, high vowels are used for stressed vowels, and unstressed vowels are written low.
• In languages with a pitch accent, like Japanese, high vowels are used for the last syllable before the fall in pitch, and other vowels are written low.
• In languages with tonal word accents, like Swedish and Norwegian, words with acute accent (accent 1 or single accent) use a high vowel on the first syllable, and words with grave accent (accent 2 or double accent) use a high vowel on both the first and second syllables.
• In languages with two register tones, like Navajo, high tones are written with high vowels, and low tones are written with low vowels.
• High pitch tones also cause vowels to be written high, as described below.

Tones

Many languages also use tones to vary the musical pitch of vowels. Shwa spells tones using small accent marks over or under the vowels. There are three of them :

Let me show you an example of how these accents are used to write tones. In Chinese, there are four contour tones, and a "fifth" tone consisting of no tone. Here are examples:

中文	Pinyin	Tone Number	Tone Description	Sound	Shwa Tone Name	Shwa
妈	mā	1st tone	Level tone		High Level tone
麻	má	2nd tone	Rising tone		High Rising tone
马	mǎ	3rd tone	Dipping tone		Low Level tone
骂	mà	4th tone	Falling tone		High Falling tone
吗	ma	"5th" tone	Neutral tone		No tone

As you can see, the accents are written above low vowels to indicate a low tone, and below high vowels to indicate a high tone. it's the position of the vowel, not the accent, that makes a tone high or low. Also note that the level tone marks are used for peaking and dipping tones (which are usually written with a circumflex or caret ∧ and a caron or breve ∨).

Here's how this system extends to some other well-known tonal languages:

Tone	Shwa	Language	Tone Name
Mid tone	(low)	Chinese	Neutral ("5th")
		Cantonese	Upper Departing (3rd)
		Vietnamese	ngang (level)
		Thai	Mid
High Rising tone		Chinese	Rising (2nd)
		Cantonese	Upper Rising (2nd)
		Vietnamese	ngã (tumbling)
High Level tone		Chinese	High (1st)
		Hong Kong Cantonese	Upper Level (1st)
		Thai	High
High Falling tone		Chinese	Falling (4th)
		Guangzhou Cantonese	Upper Falling (1st)
		Vietnamese	nặng (heavy)
Low Falling tone		Chinese	3rd before a different tone
		Cantonese	Lower Level (4th)
		Vietnamese	hỏi (asking)
		Thai	Falling
Low Level tone		Chinese	Dipping (3rd)
		Cantonese	Lower Departing (6th)
		Vietnamese	huyền (hanging)
		Thai	Low
Low Rising tone		Chinese	3rd before another 3rd tone
		Cantonese	Lower Rising (5th)
		Thai	Rising
		Vietnamese	sắc (sharp)

Here's how the accents are used :

• In languages with contour tones, like Chinese, Cantonese, Thai and Vietnamese, the accents are used as shown in the chart above. Here's an example from Cantonese, in Alphabet gait:

  

  Yùhgwó go-go dōujáu saai, bīngo léih Hēunggóng a?

• In languages with three register tones, like most Bantu languages, high tones are spelled with high vowels, mid tones with low vowels, and low tones with the Low Level accent. When a long vowel has two tones, we use a Low Rising accent to indicate low tone followed by high tone, and a Low Falling accent to indicate high tone followed by low tone (we don't use accents on the Long mark).
• In languages with four register tones, a High level accent is used. If there are more register tones, we spell them with contour tone accents, using a High Rising accent for the highest tone and a Low Falling accent for the lowest.
• In languages with tone sandhi - where tones change depending on the context - the tone may change based on the context. In such cases, the accent also changes. For example, when two Chinese syllables with Low Resting tone occur together, the first becomes Low Rising and the second one becomes Low Falling.

Vowel Voice

On the previous page, you saw how suffixes can be used to write vowel phonation. We also use accents for more detail.

Most languages only distinguish among their vowels using "major" features: high-mid-low, front-back, round-compressed-spread, short-long (or tense or advanced tongue root), nasalization and tone, and you already know how to write those in Shwa. But some languages also distinguish vowels based on stridency or phonation: there are creaky, hollow, stiff, slack, harsh and breathy vowels.

As with consonant voices, Shwa doesn't try to capture the details. In languages which display any of these features, we use the three accents for them, reserving the unaccented letters for "normal" vowels. The spelling is standardized as follows:

Feature	Accent
slack, harsh or breathy	Rising
stiff, hollow or creaky (stød)	Falling
strident, voiceless or anything else	Level

As far as I know, there's no ambiguity within languages, although of course the accents mean different things in different languages.

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