  Norwegian has the melodic contrasts too!! My text book on Indo-European languages explains about Norwegian ( and later says the same applies to Swedish) that the 2 accents developed like this: accent 1 developed from words that were originally monosyllables, eg kommer, which was komr in Old Norse, and accent 2 developed from words that were originally polysyllabic eg gater from Old Norse gotur.  Well, well, this is very informative forum. But why Danish and east-Swedish doesnÃ¤t have this?