Semantic Effects of Nouns on Tone Merger: The Ikema Dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan

Abstract

The Ikema dialect of Miyako, Southern Ryukyuan, has a three-pattern accent system in which three tone classes (Types A, B, and C) are lexically contrastive, although the Type A nouns are fewer. The biased distribution of tone classes is a consequence of a diachronic change whereby Types A and B merged together. This study aims to confirm that the original three-pattern system in Ikema retains the proto-Ryukyuan system and to demonstrate that a set of words that are originally of Type A and share specific meanings are not merged into Type B.