The aim of this paper is to analyse two varieties of Hateruma dialect, in order to describe diatopic and diachronic changes. Hateruma dialect belongs to the Yaeyama dialect group, and is spoken on Hateruma island as well as in the Shiraho village of Ishigaki island. The paper aims to compare the two varieties through an acoustic phonetic analysis, setting as a parameter the vowel space. It also carries out a comparative analysis between the varieties spoken by different generations, in order to show diachronic changes. The acoustic phonetic approach allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the Hateruma dialect vowel system.

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This paper is a critical review of Elisabeth M. de Boer's The Historical Development of Japanese Tone (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010). Traditionally, Kindaichi Haruhiko's reconstruction of the accentual system of Middle Kyoto Japanese has been widely accepted. About thirty years ago, however, an alternative theory was proposed by Samuel Robert Ramsey, according to which the tone values that Kindaichi had reconstructed as 'high' and 'low' are exactly reversed. De Boer, in her book, re-evaluates and builds on Ramsey's theory, while (almost) all other scholars have ignored it. In this paper, I introduce and review her book critically, and discuss some issues in the historical study of Japanese accent.

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Based on the descriptive studies of some 3-patterned and 2-patterned accentual systems in Northern Ryukyuan (Amami-Okinawa region), this research report proposes a list of vocabulary classified according to groups of accentual or tonal patterns which are supposed to exist for nouns, verbs, and adjectives in Proto-Ryukyuan. The list contains the vocabulary belonging to A, B, and C categories for nouns, and A and B categories for verbs and adjectives. Labelling these categories as "Keiretsu (categories)" and the vocabulary list as "Keiretsu-betsu goi," the paper argues that the vocabulary list will be useful in future field research on synchronic as well as diachronic studies on accent and phonology of the Ryukyuan linguistic systems.

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After defining an N-pattern accent as a system where only N oppositions exist irrespective of the length of the accentual unit, I examine four characteristics cross-dialectically and argue that: (1) The accentual unit is a bunsetsu, which is found pandialectally; (2) Serialization basically holds true for the system, but not, when a noun has an accent kernel specified from the end of the word; (3) Both the compound accent rule to the effect that the accent of a compound inherits the accent of its first member, and accent pattern congruity in conjugation have many exceptions. Both depend on how the dialect underwent historical changes, at least in Mainland Japanese. Finally, the histories of two-pattern accent systems in Kyushu and three-pattern accents in Oki-no-shima are considered.

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The Oki Islands, Shimane Prefecture, are considered the only area which has three-pattern accentuation in Mainland Japan, although it has been reported that several dialects of the Ryukyuan language have three-pattern accentuation. However, I have discovered three-pattern accentuation also exists in the Kokonogi dialect, Fukui Prefecture, which is located east of the Oki Islands. This paper will first describe the accent system of this dialect and verify that the dialect has some of the characteristics peculiar to N-pattern accent systems. However, the dialect does not have consistency of accent pattern in forms of the verb conjugation, something observed in some dialects with an N-pattern accent system. Finally, I will try to give a historical reason for this inconsistency by showing the correspondences between the verbal accentuation of the Kokonogi dialect and those of the Kochi dialect, which retains older accent forms than the Kyoto dialect.

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Two-pattern accent systems of Southwest Kyushu district can be classified into two large groups. One is "Kagoshima type" and the other is "Nagasaki type". "Kagoshima type" has a characteristic that falling tone appears at the end of an accent unit. On the other hand, "Nagasaki type" has a characteristic that falling tone appears on the first part of an accent unit. In this paper, I clarify the features of accent systems of the Kagoshima-shi dialect, Tanegashima dialect (these two dialects belong to "Kagoshima type"), Amakusa Hondo dialect and Yakushima Miyanoura dialect (these two dialects belong to "Nagasaki type") according to the general characteristics of N-pattern accent systems proposed by Uwano (1984, 2011), and I reveal the commonalities and differences between the accent systems of these four dialects. In addition, I present lists of the accents of particles/auxiliary verbs of the Nagasaki-shi dialect, Hondo dialect, Kagoshima-shi dialect and Tanegashima dialect, and I check the correspondences between four dialects.

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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.

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This paper analyzes the tonal pattern of alphabetic acronyms and alphabetic compounds in Nagasaki Japanese, which has two contrastive tonal types. I argue that the tonal pattern of alphabetic acronyms can be accounted for by applying loanword tone rules to them. In contrast, the tonal pattern of alphabetic compounds cannot be fully accounted for by the loanword tonal rules, because the tonal distribution of alphabetic compounds varies depending on the second member of the compound. I propose an analysis according to which the second morpheme of an alphabetic compound can determine the tonal pattern of the compound. I further support the analysis with an account of tonal patterns in short compounds.

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In this study, contrastive tones in six dialects of Japanese spoken in Yakushima are analysed as lexical tone systems in which either of the two distinctive tone contours realizes an accentual phrase according to the tonal feature of the initial word of the phrase. Given that spontaneous speech data are available for analysis, a special focus of this study is the presence of the right edge tones in both contours in five out of the six dialects, a feature shared by the Kagoshima and Tanegashima dialects. A tentative reconstruction of the three lineages is presented on the assumption that the characteristic LHL on the left edge of the type A contour in Yakushima is an innovation rather than a case of retention.

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In this paper we test the hypothesis that Ikema, a dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan, has a three-pattern accent system, where three accent classes, Types A, B, and C, are lexically distinguished, contra previous studies which have claimed that it has a two-pattern accent system. The results of our analysis confirm the existence of three distinct accent classes. The three-way distinction can only be observed in quite restricted conditions, including when nouns followed by one or more bimoraic particles precede a predicate. The results also reveal that Type A words are few in number, indicating that Type A words are in the process of merging with Type B.

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In this paper, I will describe the accent systems of the Sacheon and Sancheong dialects of Korean located in Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea. I analyze the Sacheon dialect as a four-pattern accent system, in which one accent-kernel and three word-tones are distinguished, and the Sancheong dialect as a three-pattern accent system, in which one accent-kernel and two word-tones are distinguished. Both dialects are N-pattern accent systems, where both accent-kernel and word-tone coexist within the accent system of the noun. In this regard, these N-pattern accent systems are different from the N-pattern accent systems described by Uwano Zendo (or from the word-tone languages described by Hayata Teruhiro).

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