Stress in standart Georgian is weak. Its place has been much-debated problem for many years. Experiments have shown that in standard Georgian the first syllable of a word is perceived as stressed. An acoustic peculiarity of this syllable is its high intensity and the relatively long duration of its vowel (Iza Tevdoradze, Kartuli enis p'rosodiis sak'itxebi [The problems Prosody in Georgian], Tbilisi, Mecniereba, 1978, p. 17). The place of a stressed syllable, however, is still unequivocal.

Standard Georgian speech is based on the pronunciation characteristic in Tbilisi and does not repeat the intonation of any dialect. It has developed against a background of intonational diversity of dialects as relatively neutral speech without exposed peaks. The relative weakness of stress in standard Georgian speech may be considered as a result of some kind of a compromise or of a striving to form a non-marked intonation for a  speech in the area where representatives from all parts of Georgia meet and live.