South West and Central Asia

This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asia. One representative language from each of the four main language families is passed in review, Turkish (Turkic), Mongolian (Mongolic), Persian (Indo-European), and Georgian (Kartvelian). Owing to a lack of descriptive coverage of the prosody of languages in Central Asia, no comprehensive surveys are provided. The discussion focuses on the word and sentence prosodic structures of each of the four languages, with occasional brief excursions to related languages. The languages in this area are mainly non-tonal, while contrastive lexical stress is rare across the area, and may be controversial or marginal where it was reported earlier. Vowel harmony is pervasive in Mongolic and Turkic. In all four cases, the discussion includes the expression of focus, whether in the word order or the prosody. A final section is devoted to the intonational expression of interrogativity and related meanings.