German is a foot-timed language, with a small amount of lexical and morphological stress contrast and no lexical tone or lexical pitch accent. Consequently, German prosody differs greatly both from that of pitch accent languages such as Japanese or Swedish, and that of tone languages such as those of Africa and South East Asia.
Dutch and English are both typologically and historically very close to
German, and have fundamentally quite similar prosodic systems.
The stress systems of both Dutch and German are less complex than that
of English, and have more pronounced tendencies towards initial stress
assignment. Sentence stress in both German and Dutch is influenced by
the predominant SOV word order, which reduces the tendency to sentence-final
stress, in contrast to English. Several factors result in different
rhythmic patterns. German is a relatively highly inflecting language, and
syllabic inflexional suffixes contribute to a pronounced trochaic rhythm.
The distribution and degree of vowel reduction differs in German from
those in English; in loan words, vowel quantity and quality tends to be
preserved, thus German
Phonetik -- ``phonetics''
as opposed to English 
phonetics.
The distribution of 
-elision before sonorants (nasals, laterals) in
German differs subtly from that in English. There are also differences in
the prosodic inventory; English has a rising `call contour', which is absent
in German, but the falling German call contour has a broader range of
functions than its English counterpart (see Gibbon
[12], [13]). Schubiger (see [29]) claims
that in German, modal particles such as
doch,
wohl,
ja
play similar roles to certain intonation tunes English, which does not have
such a wide range of particles and particle combinations, while German does
not have such a wide range of intonation patterns as English. This claim
has a prima facie plausibility, but has not been extensively or
systematically investigated.
The main central European German-speaking area (Austria, Germany, the Swiss German area) has border contacts with a variety of major languages (Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, Slovak and Slovenian), and there are German speaking minorities in each of these other areas. The Slavic languages Polish, Czech, Slovak and Slovene are also stress timed, their prosodic systems are similar in many general respects. But the detailed phonetic realisation of prosodic patterns differs markedly, with pronounced differences in rhythm and the bandwidth of pitch modulation.