Prosody (linguistics) is the study of the suprasegmental features of speech, which are phonetic properties that extend over multiple segments (phonemes), such as syllables, words, phrases, or entire utterances. These features primarily include pitch (encompassing intonation and lexical tone), loudness (perceived as stress or accent), tempo (rate of speech), duration (length of sounds or syllables), and rhythm. Prosody plays a crucial role in conveying linguistic information beyond the meaning of individual words, including grammatical structure, discourse organization, speaker attitude, and emotional state, and is fundamental to effective speech perception and interpretation. It constitutes a central area within phonetics and phonology and is a key component in understanding the acoustic and perceptual aspects of spoken language.