Rendaku in Tōhoku Japanese

Abstract

Rendaku in many Tōhoku dialects is manifested in the form of prenasalized voicing, and this paper provides a case study of rendaku in the dialect of Kahoku-chō, Yamagata Prefecture. After describing prenasalized voicing and its relationship to rendaku, the paper reports the results of a study conducted in 2012 on speakers of the Kahoku dialect. Prenasalization did not occur at all uniformly in the productions of the survey participants; there was considerable variation, both between speakers and between target words. Also, while sex and socio-economic group were not predictors, age was, with the oldest participant having the highest prenasalization rate. Given the complex social and historical situation regarding dialect use in Japan, the Kahoku dialect has undoubtedly been altered lexically, morphologically, and phonologically.

A new local indicator of spatial autocorrelation identifies clusters of highrendakufrequency in Japanese place names

“…The existence of a large rendaku cluster area in Northeast Japan is interesting, since it is known that in dialects of that region, the voiceless versus voiced distinction is realized differently than in Standard Japanese; that is, in intervocalic position, voiceless stops are realized as voiced and voiced ones as prenasalized (Miyashita et al, 2016). It is, however, unlikely that this cluster area is the result of place names without rendaku but intervocalic voicing erroneously recorded as exhibiting rendaku.…”

“…2 The consonant h alternates with b due to a sound change *p > h in the history of Japanese. 3 See Vance (2015) for an introduction to the topic, and Vance and Irwin (2016) for a thorough review of the issues and the relevant literature. 4 https://geocode.csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/.…”