in Kagoshima Japanese due to dialect contact

This talk reports on the ongoing tonal changes in Kagoshima Japanese (KJ), a southern dialect with about one million speakers. The traditional prosodic system of this dialect is remarkably different from that of standard Tokyo Japanese. However, young native speakers of the dialect, who are virtually bilingual between Kagoshima and Tokyo Japanese, have developed a new prosodic system in which some of the traditional features are lost. Building upon Kubozono (2007), this talk demonstrates how one prosodic system can change and, specifically, which prosodic feature is more prone to change due to the exposure to the standard dialect. KJ is different from Tokyo Japanese in its prosodic organization in the following respects. First, it has a two-pattern system (vs. a multi-pattern system): it has only two tonal patterns, Type A and Type B, irrespective of the length of the word. Second, the syllable rather than the mora is used as a basic prosodic unit. Thus, Type A has a high tone on the penultimate syllable, e.g. /a.ka.SIN.goo/ ‘red signal’, whereas Type B has a high tone on the final syllable, e.g. /a.o.sin.GOO/ ‘green signal’. Third, the compound tone rule refers to the tonal pattern of the initial morpheme to spread this pattern over the entire compound domain. This contrasts with the compound accent rule of Tokyo Japanese which is sensitive to the phonological structure of the final member of the compound. We examined how young native speakers of KJ differ from middle-aged or older speakers with respect to the tonal patterns of various types of words from monosyllabic words to newly-coined compound nouns. This study has revealed that the third feature mentioned above has changed radically, while the other two features—two-pattern, syllable-based system—remain largely intact. Thus, many young speakers do not apply the traditional compound rule any longer and assign, instead, either Type A or Type B depending on the tonal pattern of the entire compound word in Tokyo Japanese. The new prosodic system of KJ employs the same strategy for morphologically simplex words, too: Young native speakers choose between Type A and Type B in their native pronunciations by copying the tonal pattern of each word in the standard dialect although they only pay attention to the presence or absence of a pitch fall.