Abstract

Within Germanic, North Germanic is special because in many dialects words can differ only based on their melody or word accents. Tonal accents in Norwegian breaks from the traditional analyses of word accent in North Germanic in an attempt to provide a more simplex and unified analysis. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how past analyses of Norwegian and Swedish have dealt with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. The focus is on East Norwegian, however the goal is to present an approach that can account for all tonal dialects.