Heteronyms in English

I recently started teaching myself Swedish and was surprised at first to see the amount of "tonality" in the language (words can change their meaning based on how they are stressed/pronounced). Then I realized that this happens in English as well, and I stumbled upon the following list of heteronyms, which may be of interested to native speakers and of use to ESLers:

http://jonv.flystrip.com/heteronym/heteronym.htm

Is this phenomenon common in Germanic languages, or languages in general? Other than officially tonal languages like Thai, of course.

Most of those on the list look like pronunciation differences between nouns and their corresponding verbs (eg. record [noun] vs record [verb]).

I would have thought that Swedish uses a lot of words that use stress like English does for figurative meanings like the differneces between the following sentences:

Is your brother friendly? (i.e. Is your brother amicable?)

Is your brother "friendly" (i.e. Is your brother gay?)

--that type of stress difference