Abstract
This paper describes the prosodic system of Koshikijima Japanese, which is an endangered dialect spoken in the south of Japan, off the mainland of Kagoshima. This dialect resembles its sister dialect, Kagoshima Japanese, in several ways: It has a two-pattern prosodic system where words display only two tonal patterns; The domain of accent/tone assignment is the syntactic phrase known as bunsetsu rather than the word; Compounds inherit the tonal pattern of their initial morpheme. On the other hand, Koshikijima Japanese has developed its prosodic system in several unique ways. First, three-mora or longer words exhibit two high tones, or two pitch peaks. Second, this system relies both on the mora and the syllable, with the second high tone assigned to a particular mora at (or near) the end of the word and the first high tone linked to one or more syllables at the beginning of the word. Finally, this dialect has a high tone deletion rule whereby the second high tone of each word/phrase is deleted in non-final positions of the sentence.
