Syntactic stress

Hindi is a so-called syllable-timed language unlike Standard English which is stress-timed. Hindi (including Fiji Hindi) does not have a strong syntactic stress pattern, at least not to the extent that unstressed syllables are markedly reduced or hurried as they are in English. The total duration of the utterance in Hindi is dependent more on the number of syllables it contains than on the number and position of stressed syllables, as it is in English. In Hindi, the tendency to raise pitch rather than increase loudness to indicate emphasis also contributes to this quality. Words that are normally accented in unmarked Standard English sentences are often left unaccented in the English of Indo-Fijians and vice versa.