Accent is realised by an increase in pitch and a slight increase in length of the stressed syllable. Unstressed syllables are not reduced in Eastern Banggai, but the faster speaking Western Banggai often do reduce them. The accent always falls on the penultimate syllable. When one or more suffixes are added to a stem the accent shifts to the resulting penultimate syllable. Except for the articles, a preposition and the inflected forms of the pronouns there are no monosyllabic words or stems in Banggai. When a word seems to be monosyllabic it has a long vowel, which in fact consists of two syllables underlyingly. Theoretically, the accent falls on the first of these two vowels, but since they are pronounced as one lengthened sound it falls on both in reality. That long vowels are in fact two syllables can be seen in polysyllabic words the last syllable of which has such a lengthened vowel. The stress then falls on the first part of this long vowel, giving the impression that it falls on the final syllable. The same happens with loanwords that originally have a schwa in the penultimate syllable, as well as onomatopoeic words. In fact these words have a lengthened final syllable rather than two syllables, but they are interpreted as disyllabic. In loanwords with two consecutive consonants an epenthetic vowel is added between these consonants. Because this epenthetic vowel cannot bear stress when it occurs in penultimate position, the stress falls on the final syllable which is lengthened. If a diphthong occurs in the final syllable it acts as two syllables and gets the stress. If it occurs in the penultimate syllable, however, the stress does not shift but falls on the first part of the diphthong. In words of four or more syllables a secondary stress falls on the first syllable. If one of the intermediate syllables has a diphthong, however, the secondary stress falls on the first part of this diphthong. (van den Bergh 1953)

maŋˈkabi to ask

maŋkaˈbimo to have asked

maŋkabiˈkene ask for him

aˈsaaŋ breath

maŋkaˈbai to make

kinaˈbaimo already been made

ˌsaliŋuˈŋud�’on to lament

paˌtaiˈkene allow

ˈlaŋkai man

ˈtobui sea