Phonemically Esperanto's repertoire consists of 23 consonants and 5 vowels. Segment length is not phonemic. Stress is regularly placed on the second last syllable of each polysyllabic word, adjacent vowels counting as separate syllables. Sometimes stress occurs elsewhere for the purposes of emphasising a particular morpheme of a word to make the meaning clearer. Secondary stresses may also be present in longer words.
Stress is indicated by volume rather than pitch.
Declarative and interrogative sentences tend to have different intonation patterns from one another, as in most European languages. Different tones are not significant at a segmental level. Typologically, Esperanto is mostly an agglutinating language, like e.g. Swahili, Turkish or Quechua, in that each affix has a fixed meaning. However, as each affix can also be used independently as a root and sometimes even as a word, this means that the language also has an isolating nature to it as well. The number of bound morphemes and other features typical of a flexional language are severely limited in Esperanto.