The lowering of pitch on a stressed syllable is also true of Russian. It's what gives Swedish what to English speakers sounds like a sing-song way of speaking. Even moreso in Norwegian, which actually uses pitch to differentiate between words.
Yeah, I've wondered about that, since, to my ear, Norwegian is so much more sing-song. Now I know why y'all think Swedish is too!
For example in many East Norwegian dialects, the word "bønder" (farmers) is pronounced using tone 1, while "bønner" (beans or prayers) uses tone 2. Though the difference in spelling occasionally allows the words to be distinguished in written language, in most cases the minimal pairs are written alike. A Swedish example would be the word "tomten," which means "Santa Claus" (or "the house gnome") when pronounced using tone 2, and means "the plot of land," "the yard," or "the garden" when pronounced using tone 1. Thus, the sentence "Är det tomten på tomten?" ("Is that Santa Claus out in the yard?") uses both pronunciations right next to each other. Another example in Swedish is the word "anden", which means "the duck" when using tone 1 and "the spirit" when using tone 2. "Den heliga anden" could, in writing, be construed as either "the Holy Spirit" or "the holy duck", whereas in speech the pitch accent would convey the intended meaning.
I've tried to explain this to English speaking people, but never knew exactly how to make them understand it since they can't hear the difference.
I've never seen it explained in English before. Tack Körkompis!
