Balto-Slavic Accentual System
The Proto-Indo-European accent was completely reworked in Balto-Slavic, with far-reaching consequences for accentual systems of the modern daughter languages. For the reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic accent the most important are the Balto-Slavic languages that have retained tonal oppositions, these being Lithuanian, Latvian, (probably) Old Prussian and the West South Slavic languages of Slovene and Serbo-Croatian. However, one should keep in mind that the prosodical systems of dialects in the aforementioned languages are sometimes very different from those of standard languages. For example, some Croatian dialects like Čakavian and Posavian dialects of Slavonian Štokavian are especially important for Balto-Slavic accentology as they retain more archaic and complex tonal accentual system than the Neoštokavian dialect on which modern standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian) are based. On the other hand, many dialects have completely lost tonal oppositions (e.g. some Kajkavian varieties, the Zagreb spoken nonstandard idiom).
To this day, there is no consensus among Balto-Slavists on the precise details of the development of Balto-Slavic accentual system. All modern research is based on the seminal study of Stang (1957), which basically instituted the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology. However, a number of laws and correspondences have been discovered that are nowadays held to be true by the majority of researchers, even though the exact details sometimes remain in dispute.
Read more about this topic: Proto-Balto-Slavic Language
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