This is the first comprehensive work on word and sentence prosody in Koshikijima Japanese a
dialect of Japanese not fully documented in the literature. It is an endangered dialect spoken
by about 2 000 speakers on a small southern island in Japan. Being separated from mainland
dialects by the sea this dialect exhibits unique prosodic features not shared by other
Japanese dialects. It also exhibits considerable regional variations among the ten or more
small villages that were isolated from each other until recently.Based on the author's
fieldwork the book analyzes word accent and intonation the two linguistic areas in which this
endangered dialect exhibits unique features and remarkable regional variations within itself.
They include the emergence and development of a secondary H tone postlexical deletion of the
primary H tone and the L boundary tone in question and vocative intonation. These phenomena
bear crucially on general issues in prosody including postlexical tonal neutralizations
competitions between lexical and postlexical tones and the number of tones that a syllable can
maximally bear. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of studying an endangered language
dialect in general linguistic contexts.
