Japanese pitch accent

Japanese pitch accent ( kōtei akusento) is a feature of the Japanese language. It distinguishes words in most Japanese dialects, though the nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects. For instance, in standard Tokyo Japanese the word for "now" is [i ma], with the accent on the first syllable (or equivalently, with a downstep in pitch between the first and second syllables), but in the Kansai dialect it is [i.ma]. A final [i] or [u] is often devoiced to [i̥] or [u̥] after a downstep and an unvoiced consonant.