Diversity of Pitch Accent Systems in Koshikijima Japanese

Abstract

This article describes the diversity of pitch accent systems found in Koshikijima Japanese in comparison with those of Kagoshima and Tokyo Japanese. Koshikijima Japanese is a highly endangered dialect spoken on the Koshikijima Islands in the south of Japan. While sharing many phonological features with Kagoshima and Nagasaki Japanese, this dialect is strikingly different from the sister dialects in several respects. Unlike Kagoshima Japanese, for example, Koshikijima Japanese is basically a mora-counting language where the number of moras, and not syllables, is counted to compute the position of word-level phonological prominence. Unlike Kagoshima and Nagasaki, moreover, most of Koshikijima’s systems permit more than one High tone in relatively long words, apparently violating the principle of culminativity. Furthermore, Koshikijima Japanese displays a high degree of regional variations, thus developing several pitch accent systems that are different from each other in several respects such as culminativity, mora-syllable interactions, the interactions between the two High tones, and the High tone deletion phenomenon at the post-lexical level.