Tonal Change in Nagasaki Japanese

1.はじめに 2.調査方法 3.名詞のアクセント変化 4.動詞のアクセント変化 5.結論This paper describes the tonal change in Nagasaki Japanese, which is spoken in and around Nagasaki city. The dialect has two tonal types: Type A tone (falling tone) and Type B tone (non-falling tone). Our fieldwork with native speakers revealed three points regarding diachronic tonal change: (i) tonal change took place in native (Yamato) words and foreign loanwords, (ii) tonal change took place in nouns but not in verbs, and (iii) an asymmetric distribution of the direction of tonal change was found (Type A to Type B was the most common)