Dragon27 wrote:In (standard) Serbo-Croatian each stressed syllable is of the two types: rising or falling. When the pitch is falling, it stays low for the rest of the word. When it's rising, it continues to rise for one-two syllables (the exact pattern depends on the number of syllables after the stressed one) and then falls down afterwards.
This is an excellent explanation (I think I'll steal it) just one tiny detail: stress shifts or changes tone in various forms of one word. Famously, words like
voda water have the rising stress in nominative, but falling in accusative (beside the change of ending!). Even better, putting a preposition before a noun (or negation before the verb) can affect the stress (which can move to preposition and sometimes also change pitch).
However, many dialects don't have this "move" feature. And many dialects (including the one of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia) have no pitch at all (and the stress is often on a different syllable than in standard). There are variations also in Serbia.
The end result is: if you have pitch stress in your home dialect, you use it; if you don't, you don't, so you can watch a TV show where one person asks a question with pitch stress, and another responds without any pitch. The stress is not indicated in writing, so everyone can spell the same. So in the long run, the pitch stress is probably going to become marginal one day, at least in Croatia.