Downstep is a phonemic or phonetic downward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It's best known from West Africa, but the pitch accent of Japanese (a non-tonal language) is quite similar to downstep in Africa. It contrasts with the much rarer upstep. The symbol for downstep in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript down arrow, ^↓, which is not yet supported by Unicode. It's common to see a superscript exclamation mark, ^!, used instead. In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; that is, changing a phoneme in a word produces either nonsense, or a different word with a different meaning. ... Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ... For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music). ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... Unicode is an international standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ...

Phonetic downstep may occur between sequences of the same phonemic tone. For example, when two mid tones occur together in Twi, the second is at a lower pitch than the first. Thus downshift plays a vital role in downdrift and tone terracing. Twi (pronounced chwee) is a language spoken in Ghana by about 6 million people. ... Downdrift is a linguistic phenomenon defined as the lowering of high tones that are separated by low tones. ...

Phonemic downstep may occur when a low tone is elided, or occurs as a floating tone, and leaves a following tone at a lower level than it would otherwise be. An example occurs in Bambara. In this language, the definite article is a floating low tone. With a noun in isolation, it docks to the preceding vowel, turning a high tone into a falling tone: [bá] river; [bâ] the river. However, when it occurs between two high tone, it downsteps the following tone: [bá tɛ́] it's not a river; [bá ^↓ tɛ́] it's not the river. In music, see elision (music). ... Bambara, also known as Bamanankan in the language itself, is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people (including second language users). ... Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ...

Japanese pitch accent is similar. About 80% of Japanese words have an evenly rising pitch, something like French, which carries over onto following unstressed grammatical particles. However, a word may have a drop in pitch between moras, or before the grammatical particle. An example is Mora can mean: Cameroon Mora, Cameroon Costa Rica Mora Canton Portugal Mora, Portugal Sweden Mora, Sweden - a municipality of Dalarna County in Sweden Mora Court District - a district of Dalecarlia in Sweden United States Mora, Minnesota, United States Mora County, New Mexico, United States Mora (linguistics): A unit of sound...

In isolation like this, the first word has a high-low pitch, whereas the second and third are homonyms with a low-high pitch. However, all three are distinct when followed by the so-called "subject" particle ga: