A preliminary study on the phonetic variation of the velar nasal in Japanese

An analysis of the Gujo and Kitaibaraki dialects

Abstract

This preliminary study focuses on a phonetic variation of the velar nasal, which appears as an allophone of /g/ in several Japanese dialects. The author investigated two dialects, Gujo (Gifu prefecture) and Kitaibaraki (Ibaraki prefecture), both of which were considered to have the velar nasal according to previous studies. Tokens containing /g/ in the recorded data were analyzed through the inspection of spectrograms. As a result, the author identified two patterns, the typical velar nasal stop and the nasalized velar approximant. The latter pattern was acoustically characterized as the lack of formant damping, which is one of the most significant characteristics of a nasal stop. It is not clear whether this variation correlates with sociolinguistic factors such as region. More data are needed to answer this question.