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AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle

"Rise. and shine. Miiisster. Freeeeman. RIse. and shine. Not. That I... wIsh to IMply you have been. slEEping on the jo-ob. No- oNE is more deSERving of. a. rest. And all the EFF-ort in the world. would have gone. to waste. until... well, let's jUst say... your hour has... come again. The right man In the wrong pl-Ace can. make ALL the dIFFerENCe... in the world. So, wake up, Miiister. Freeman. Wake up. and smell the ashes. "

— The G-Man, Half-Life

Whether intentional or unintentional, this is when a character is placing the emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word.

In song lyrics, it's usually because the song was done by some foreigner who hasn't quite grasped the rules of stress in their second language, but sometimes they're just being completely incompetent about setting lyrics to music. This can lead to Mondegreens if the wrong syllable is too jarring. It can, however, be done even by native speakers for purposes of metre.

Sometimes, this is done in dubs when the lips are clearly visible.

In this trope's own name, to take an obvious example, the accent in the very word 'accent' varies largely depending which country you're from: British use tends to favour AKS-nt, whereas US use, for instance, would be more AK-SENT. By comparison, both usually stress the second syllable in 'accentuate' (ak-SEN-tchoo-ate), which shows how variable the language can be.

INtentionAL EXamples

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Anime and Manga

In Detective Conan, Jodie Starling uses this as a form of Obfuscating Stupidity. Naturally, Hattori calls her out on it right off the bat.
Dlanor in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. The last word of her sentences is always EMPHASIZED. It is the English equivalent chosen for her speaking style in Japanese, where she speaks with a cold, robotic voice and ends her sentences with copulas written in KATAKANA.
- Also used for a very creepy effect in Episode 7: When Willard tells Shannon to go and get Kanon so that he can talk to both of them together, her eyes suddenly become dull and she starts to talking this way while refusing. The more she gets pushed to do so, the number of emphasized syllables increases until in the end everything she says is written in capitalized letters. This is in fact the first more or less obvious hint that Shannon and Kanon are the same person and therefore can not both appear in front of Willard at the same time.
  "It iS the oNE who orDERS US."
The English version of Ponyo's ending theme:
Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo, she's a little fish
She's a little fish from the deep blue sea
Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo, she's a little girl
She's a little girl with a round tum-MY.
"Alsatia", the opening theme from Mnemosyne: "It's Alsay-SHEE-a!"
The Code Geass picture drama Miraculous Birthday has a funny gag where Lelouch incorrectly teaches the student council to say "Yes, your ma-JEST-y" repeatedly.
In the original Japanese version of Digimon Adventure 02, the Chosen Children owned power-ups for their Digimon called Digimentals. When these were activated, they shouted, "Digimental UUUUP!", which, though a little hammy, is nevertheless an aversion of this trope. Come the infamous English Dub, and for some reason or another it was decided to change this call to "Digi-armour ENERGISE!". Due to the lip-flaps, however, the syllable of this shout that was stretched out was the "er" in "energise". The result was "Digi-armour enEEEEEEEEERgise!"
Pedro and his family speak like this in the Japanese version of Excel Saga. This may be part of the attempt to play the characters in an exaggerated Spanish/South American accent.
When the anime Card Captor Sakura was translated for Brazilian audiences, "SAH-Koo-Ra" was changed to "Sah-KOO-Ra".
The English dub of Naruto does this often. Perhaps the most immediate example is KA-ka-shi, who in the dub gives his name as Ka-KA-shi.
- This happens other time, like with the Rinnegan. The pronunciation is "Ren-Ay-Gan", the dub pronounces it "Ren-E-Gan", like one would pronounce "Renegade" in English. And don't get me started on the Australian dub opening of the original Naruto. Sah-soo-kay, right....

Comedy

Emo Phillips sometimes employs this as part of his stage persona.
Eddie Izzard used this to illustrate how awkward it is when Robin Hoods have American accents.
- "Where is the Maid MarEYEan? And the Sheriff of NottingHAM? I live in SherWOOD ForEST!"
Mitch Hedberg liked to stress the second part of a compound noun. "... sounded an awful lot like car HORNS"; "you are never blocking a fire EXIT".

Film

In �Manos�: The Hands of Fate, the character Torgo speaks with an awkward rhythm that sometimes makes him sound like he's stressing the wrong syllables.
Martin Short's wedding planner character in Father Of The Bride, by way of his generically foreign accent.
The otherwise-forgettable film View From The Top has Mike Myers saying the trope name after another flight attendant mispronounces the word "assess". link
Monty Python and the Holy Grail has the Knights of the Round Table, whose shows are formidAYble, but many times they're given rhymes that are quite unsingAYble.
The Thermians in Galaxy Quest. Nice guys, but really lousy at acting human.
In Megamind, the titular Card-Carrying Villain's pronunciation of "Metro City" as "MeTROcity" (rhymes with "atrocity") becomes an important plot point. He also has trouble pronouncing a few other words, such as "school" and "hello."
In Ghostbusters II, Janosz's silly accent occasionally involves stressing the wrong syllable.
In The Beatles movie Help!, the cult members pronounce Beatle as "be-AT-tull" (rhyming with "Seattle").
In The Thin Man movies they keep referring to the people who might have done as the "susPECTS".
Maybe not an intended example, but a number of dwarf-names in The Hobbit movie are accentuated wrong. Tolkien himself was a scholar in old Germanic languages, and accented the names in the book after norse fashion: D�in, Thr�in, and so on. The movie omits all accents, so the intended pronunciation on two syllables (D�-in) is dropped, so the name D�in sounds like "dane", and Thr�in like "Train". As the accents are dropped from the entire movie franchise, it seems the movie makers try to justify this error.
A Christmas Story: The arrival of the infamous lamp.
Aahhh, "Fra-GIL-ay!" It must be Italian!
"SerPEEEEEENT!!!"

Literature

In Damon Knight's science fiction story "You're Another," there's a man in the year 4000 or so whose native language is Esperanto (though not named). When he speaks English, he has a thick Esperanto accent, and stresses the penultimate syllable of every word, just as in Esperanto. (E.g., "Now you will give me d'instrument.")
In Alan Dean Foster's Glory Lane, an alien in disguise on Earth is described as talking like this trope, stressing the wrong syllables and words, due to having learned English from a cheap crash course.
Don't try to pronounce the surname of Hogfather antagonist Jonathan Teatime the way it looks (the correct pronunciation is 'Teh-ah-tim-eh'); people getting it wrong irritates him. Surprisingly enough for a psychotic assassin, he just asks them to get it right.
- Though the book does not clearly show which syllables should be stressed, in The Movie, he says it 'TEH-ah-TEEM-eh'.
This is how Jaina Solo and Lando Calrissian realize that a robot is impersonating Lando and giving his droids orders in Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Vortex.

Live-Action TV

A surprisingly eerie example from Doctor Who is with the Mondasian Cybermen in The Tenth Planet.
On Community, Pierce routinely mispronounces Abed's name as "Ay-bed".
On an episode of Red Dwarf, Rimmer asks Lister not to pronounce his name the way he does. Lister asks if he should call him "RimMAIR".
This skit from The sketch Show features a man with this problem. He's a speech theRAPIST.
In The Middleman, it's how Tyler knows the "job interview" he's at is actually a test, and the board is fake: the head of the board keeps pronouncing Manservant Neville's name the way you'd assume it was pronounced. It's not — it's "MONserVENT NeVULE".
Reid on Criminal Minds occasionally puts a weird emphasis on a weird syllable when he speaks — he says the word "theater," for example, as "thee-AY-ter", every single time. That probably has less to do with getting it wrong and more to do with being raised by an English professor and hanging onto antiquated pronunciations that everyone else doesn't bother with anymore or it could be pronunciation was a Nevada/Jello Belt thing.
Captain Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does this, although it at least stays plausable throughout.
- Michael Dorn also once said in an interview that he did this when playing Worf so he would have a distinct speech pattern from the rest of the (mostly human or Human Alien) crew.
In an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Peter Weller played a terrorist who threatened to release a virus if a global video conference involving every nation's capital on Earth was not cancelled. His right hand man told him "there are no plans to halt the summit in Can-BERRA or Berlin". The writer having known that Canberra exists and is the capital of Australia is more than Canberrans have come to expect, but it's pronounced CAN-berra. CAN-bra, with the last vowel cut off to sound like a hard "u", is also common and acceptable.
One episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation has Q meddling in on Captain Picard's shoreleave. Being the trickster that he is, he dresses up as a message courier and plays this trope just to annoy him.
I have a package for a... Jeen Luck... Pikerd?
In a later episode of Friends, Ross finds that he tends to slip into a stereotypical English accent during his new job of lecturing at a college, as a result of nerves. Mid-lecture, under the assumption that he wasn't being listened to anyway, he attempts to reassert his normal accent, but finds that he starts slipping in and out, resulting in the placement of emphasis on strange parts of words, such as saying "IdentiFY'".
- Chandler has a habit of emphasizing the word "be", which occasionally joked upon by the others.
A sketch on The Day Today features a spoof advert for a documentary about the footballer John Fashanu, which consists solely of a man saying "John FA-shanu" in a sinister voice for 15 seconds... immediately followed by the presenter announcing "That's John Fa-SHA-nu, tonight on BBC 2".
A common quirk of the narrator of the Brazilian comedy show P�nico na TV.
A Saturday Night Live skit with Alec Baldwin was a play off of soap operas when a scene is done live and the actors have to read off the teleprompters. Baldwin's character, a doctor, was constantly mispronouncing words, leading to the memorable "Quick nurse! There appears to be something caught in his eso-phagus."
Monty Python's Flying Circus
- "What if someone attacks you with a poin-TED stick?" "SHUT UP!"
- Monty Python's Flying CirCUSSSSSSS
In The IT Crowd, Moss recommends a restaurant he calls "Meh-SEE-joze" (making it sound French or Spanish) when its name is clearly "Messy Joe's."

Music

Alanis Morissette. And how!
Bad Religion: Lots. A few examples from "Parallel": "Phony COLLective progess, ACCepting that it's all such a mess", and in the background, "our lives are paralLEL"... later, "watching as our FOUNdations crumble away"
R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet.
Sir William Gilbert loved to invoke this trope, taking it to deliberately ridiculous lengths.
The somewhat obscure Trope Namer, "Sing a Tropical Song," was written for the 1943 movie musical Happy Go Lucky. The Andrews Sisters also recorded it. "Rum and CoCAAA-Cola"
Almost every song ever performed by Coheed and Cambria.
- You could practically make a drinking game based upon how many times Claudio Sanchez stretches the simple word "I" into nearly two syllables ("Eeeyiii...")
The majority of Stereolab songs do this. Laetitia Sadier's lyrics are mostly very political, and with a much heavier focus on content and message than in meter and prosody. Notorious examples include "Perversion" and "Metronomic Underground".
There are several examples of this in Manic Street Preachers' album The Holy Bible. The reason for this is that the lyricist, Richey James Edwards, tended to write his lyrics in a sort of free-form stream of consciousness style. As a result, James Dean Bradfield (who wrote the music) had to try and force lines into musical passages that did not quite match up. As a result, Bradfield often pronounced words in odd ways, including accentuating the wrong syllable. There are also examples from their other work, such as "They call me Mr hy-PO-chon-DRI-a" (Mr Carbohydrate), "We need and will always need/Another invented DIS-ease" (Another Invented Disease), and "Is it about the pol-UH-tics of celebrity" (Socialist Serenade).
- James also is fond of adding extra syllables for instance: "Natwest! Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Loy-hoyds!" (Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds), "A design! For-her life" (A Design For Life) "We are not ready for drow-how-ning" (Ready For Drowning).
- Catatonia, another Welsh band, also did the "extra syllable" part: Singer Cerys Matthews pronounced "endlessly" as "End-uh-less-ly" in every instance of its use on their single "Londinium".
The Bangles' song "Walk Like an Egyptian" has several instances where the pronunciation is strange either to rhyme, or to make them fit with the cadence, such as the lines "All the school kids so sick of books / They like the punk and the metal band / When the buzzer rings (oh whey oh) / They're walking like an Egyptian" where the last word is pronounced "egyp-tian" instead of the usual "e-gyp-tian." One would normally expect the word "Egyptian" to land on a strong accent, as "E-gyp-tian". In this case, it falls across the accent, as "AN e-GYP-TI-an", both placing the accent in an unexpected place and dividing the final syllable into two.
KT Tunstall's "Another Place To Fall"—"see yourself as a fallen anGEL". Tunstall again, "Other Side of the World"—"Most of every day/Is filled with tired excuSES".
"Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac. "When the rain waSHES you clean you'll know."
The Korpiklanni song "Keep on Galloping" has an English chorus in which the singer puts emphasis in the wrong places to match the beat. For example, instead of saying "Gallop-ing," he's say "Ga-lo-ping."
- "Here comes the wo-ma-NAY-zer!"
A certain Spanish language ballad (circa 1997? by Rocio Durcal?) has a verse ending with a phrase to the effect that her tears are stuck in her throat. In Spanish, that's "garganta". There's nothing unusual about the way the word itself is accented, but it's unusual to hear such an unattractive-sounding word placed in full prominence at the climactic point of a musical phrase and backed with lush orchestration, rather than buried in an inconspicuous part of the verse.
- Steely Dan are noted for this, placing unexpected phrases like "zombie" and "The Eagles" at prominent parts of a phrase for surprise effect.
Sabaton of all bands manages to combine this with Trolling Creator with their track "A Secret", which warns the listeneer that an illegal download has been detected and that it is executed spyware protocol six hundred sixty-six. Yes, it speaks the number aloud in proper word form, but the computerized voice messes with the stress pattern, so it can be extremely difficult to understand what is being said.
"Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols has the latter word pronounced "VaCANT", making it sound like the word "cunt".
In "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", Gordon Lightfoot pronounces "Detroit" with three syllables—"De-troy-it". Native Detroiters usually pronounce it "da-TROYT." The last "t" is really more of a glottal stop than anything.
- This is the standard Canadian pronunciation of "Detroit" and not Lightfoot's invention.
Enter Shikari normally avoid this trope, but "Gap In The Fence" has a particularly extreme example.
"Yes GRANted we PROSper, but the FACT that we PROSper... is Even TAken FOR granTEEEEEEEEE-duh."
- Yes, they did indeed add a whole new syllable to the word granted.
MC Frontalot's Charisma Potion Lampshades this in a small skit at the end
Front's DM: Damien, are you saying Attribute, or Attribute?
Front: Attribute, obviously.
Front's DM: 'Cause it kind of comes off like "attribiute". If you were saying "attribute", then it would be a verb.
Front: The words do whatever I tell them to.
Majela Zeze Diamond doesn't seem to care very much about getting her accents on the right syllable. Example (spoilered out for NSFW): Wet AND jui-CY sweet VA-gi-NA
The Beatles's "Michelle".
Several times in "Song 2" by blur.
By a JumBO jet
- And later in the chorus:
Well I feel heaVY meTAL
And I'm pins and I'm needles
Andy Gibb: The chorus to Sha-DOW Dan-CING!!!
Rhapsody of Fire's "Sea of Fate" practically runs on this trope.
FragMENTS of torTURED
ExistENCE reVEALing cold WHISpers
- Many European Power Metal bands suffer from this.
From the Pussycat Dolls' "When I Grow Up":
"We all want to be fay-MUSS!"
"Genius Of Love" by the Tom Tom Club. "No one can sing / Quite like Smokey, Smokey Ro-BIN-son."
As you might expect, this trope (along with mispronunciations galore) features in the song "Bad English" by Qu�b�cois comedian Fran�ois P�russe.
Pink Floyd's The Wall has a few, most notably "Another Brick in the Wall Pt.2" ("No dark sar-CAS-um") and "Hey You".
Foo Fighters' "These Days": "Your heart has never been bro-KEHN" (specially as the word which it rhymes to, "stolen", is pronounced normally)

Newspaper Comics

In Pearls Before Swine, Pig mispronounces "atlas" as "atLAS" in order to make a really bad Pun.
Many characters in Pogo do this.

Radio

On My Music, one of the panelists once described "Michelle" by The Beatles as "one of those songs that has the emPHASis on the sylLAble".
On TAPS Para-radio, hosts Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson would challenge Dave Tango to a word game where he is tasked with pronouncing an obscure multisyllabic word correctly. Dave would often fail and in one episode, Grant complained that Dave put the "emPHASis on the wrong sylLAble",

Theatre

In the second act of Richard Wagner's Meistersinger, Sachs strikes his cobbler's hammer each time Beckmesser does this in his serenade, Den Tag seh' ich erscheinen.
In the musical 1776, Richard Henry Lee emphasizes the "-ly" at the end of every adverb he uses in both dialogue and song as a tribute to his prominent fami-Lee.
Several times in A Very Potter Musical dialogue:
"Come on, let's go watch Wizards of Waverly Place."

Video Games

In ADOM, Chaos cultists' mIxEd cAsE dIaLoGuE is probably intended to represent this.
True Assassin from Fate/stay night, used as a sign that his body and mind are not entirely stable due to the circumstances of his creation. After he manages to "repair" himself by eating the remains of Caster and Lancer he begins talking normally.
In Final Fantasy VIII, President Deling's body double talks like this. Given what he transforms into after you kill him, it's not surprising.
- Final Fantasy IV also does this to the Dark Elf in the Advance remake.
The G-Man from the Half-Life series speaks like this, along with speeding up and slowing down randomly and a bit of Vader Breath and Snake Talk.
- Also done with the COMbine to emphasize it's a noun. Unfortunately this doesn't solve confusion with tractors.
The flamingo in Max Payne 2's Show Within a Show, Address Unknown. Justified because the flamingo's dialogue is the dialogue spoken backwards, then played in reverse.
In the game Portal, GLaDOS speaks in this manner, on top of the already distorted, artificial sound of her voice. And the frequent random scrambling and nonsense.
Loki from Video Game/Rune does this during his masterplan exposition, whilst having a good deal of mood swings from manic to psychotic. Then again, he's chained to a rock whilst being subjected to corrosive poisons, so he's not alltogether a balanced individual.
Some demons in Shin Megami Tensei (particularly Slime) like to do this.
In the game Freelancer, a professor (whose name I forget) mentions losing the people chasing them in the "ME-thane" fields. Lampshaded in the main character's personal logs, "Who says ME-thane? It's METH-ane!"

Web Animation

Homestar Runner's Strong Bad does it all the time when reading his email messages, often done to accentuate spelling errors. All the speaking characters have spoken this way at least once. There are even a few pages on the Homestar Runner Wiki listing their occurrence.

Web Video

Bro Team Pill - Women are always pronounced "WAH-min".
The Game Grumps often enunciate words improperly (usually Jon). This is lampshaded by Arin in one episode:
"What is with you and your enunCIations?"
- As a general example, Arin's name is pronounced "AIR-ren".
Pat of Two Best Friends Play often conflates words and accents them oddly; for example, pronouncing Persona 4 as "PerSOnafour".

Western Animation

Dexter's Laboratory: "Dee Dee! Get out of my laBOratory!" Dexter in general sounds like a stereotypical Mad Scientist of indeterminate Eastern European origin.
Family Guy: The ghost of Peter's father: "You must go to the dagobaaaaah SY Stem."
While they were casting Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, when Stephen Colbert auditioned for the eponymous role, they told him to do this every sentence or so. It... didn't quite work out, as one can see on the first DVD collection.
Dr. Zoidberg on Futurama pronounces "robot" as "RO-bit," which is ironically how the word was first pronounced.
In Daria, Mr. DeMartino yells VARious syllaBLLES COMpletely at ranDOM! The guy is generically angry and about half a cup of coffee from exploding into a gigantic mass of high-strung destruction, so it's more like he's trying to emphasize everything.
- In the episode "Fair Play", Quinn has a single line in a play that she keeps rehearsing. After the usual encouragement from Sandi ("Is that how you're going to say it?"), Quinn tries out ever more bizarrely accented readings. Her final delivery makes her sound like an idiot; that and other impending disasters lead to her humiliation. "I WILL make a DAINty garLAND for my HEAD and SING!"
- In "This Year's Model", Romonica calls up Schloss Morgendorffer to suggest that Quinn would be an ideal candidate for modelling. Daria answers, and mocks Romonica's accent when addressing Daria, responding, "And I am DAria MORgenDORffer."
In the first season finale of Drawn Together, Toot does this as part of a gag where she does a bad job pretending to be interested in an Apprentice-style reality show game.
Veggie Tales Silly Song "Monkey" had Larry say, "We finally did it, photo-GRAPH-er!"
In Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the episode where they prepare for their trip to Europe has a character who constantly sings, "Because I'MMA GOING to EUR-ope!"

Real Life

George Bush referenced this during the 2000 election campaign, where in one debate, he admitted "I've been known to mangle a syllable or two myself."
Opera singers whose first language is English are often given the following advice about pronouncing the works of Bartok and Janacek: "In HUN-garian and CZECH-oslovakian, the ACC-ent is AL-ways on the first SYLL-able, no EX-ceptions ." This worked better back when Czechoslovakia was a country, but if you just say "Czech" it wrecks the joke.
Legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell did this, often with common words, like "intricacies" which he consistently pronounced in-TRICK-a-sees. Whether this was part of his grating persona, or unintentional, is debatable.
Argentinian Spanish comes across as this to other Spanish speakers, due to the conjugation of the "vos" pronoun that has been relegated to a reserve of Argentina. "Pru�-ba-lo", for example, becomes "pro-b�-lo".
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chr�tien often used to joke that he often "put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle"; the less charitable joke about him was that he was the first Canadian Prime Minister in history who couldn't express himself coherently in either of Canada's official languages. Ironically, this was at least in part an intentional branding strategy to make himself look stupider than he really was; in actual fact, he was a remarkably canny strategist whose political instincts quite regularly blew "smarter" politicians right out of the water.
JFK said we should go the moon by the end of this "deCADE"
Latin poetry was dependent upon meter and scansion. These are essentially the meter and emphasis on syllables respectively. It's a great way to wreak havoc with Latin students who aren't familiar with it, and it's even more vexingly difficult to pull of correctly.
This is often used for comedy when lampooning the French Canadian accent.

UnINtentionAL EXamples