Carrier has a very simple tone system of the type often described as pitch accent—it is in fact very similar to the prototypical pitch-accent language, Japanese. In Dakeł, a word may or may not have a tonic syllable. If it does not, the pitch rises gradually across the phonological word. If it does have a tonic syllable, then that syllable has a high pitch, the following syllable falls to a low pitch, and subsequent syllables until the end of the prosodic unit are also low pitched. Any syllable in the word may carry the accent; if it is the final syllable, then the first syllable of the following word is low pitched, even if it would otherwise be tonic. Representing this phonemic drop in pitch with the downstep symbol , there is a contrast between the surface tone following an unaccented word "xoh" "goose" compared with the accented word "yesꜜ" "wolf":