I have suggested (Accentual mobility: the prehistory of the Balto-Slavic mobile accent paradigms,
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2006) that the origin of the paradigmatic
accent mobility in the Baltic and Slavic languages (e.g. Russian nom. sg. golová, acc. sg. gólovu,
gen. sg. golový; nom.-acc. pl. gólovy, gen. pl. golóv, etc.) may be found in a pre-Proto-Balto-
Slavic accent loss in syllables with a certain structure. When I presented this hypothesis I did
not adduce typological evidence in favour of an accent loss of this kind.
Recently, however, Henning Andersen has pointed out that typologically similar, if not
identical, processes of accent loss have taken place independently in Slavonian dialects of
Štokavian and Karelian dialects of Russian.
In this paper I shall examine the perspectives these typological parallels open for the
discussion of the origin of the Balto-Slavic paradigmatic accent mobility.