This paper reports the quantitative analyses of the high vowel loss in Japanese migrants in the North America. With a centurion history of the migration from Japan, the migrant’s first languages were transplanted into the new communities in the US. Surrounded by other migrants of their origin, with various dialectal backgrounds, the dialect contact in each language had led to the establishment of the regional, albeit unstable, koine. The description of the koines has not been comprehensively conducted in both languages. This paper is, therefore, a first attempt to describe a feature of the Japanese koines, i.e. the phonological phenomenon of High Vowel Loss.
High Vowel Loss refers to the deletion of the unstressed /i/ and /u/. This feature can be observed in Japanese (Kondo 1994), Kozani Greek (Topitzi & Baltazani 2012), and many others (Gordon 1998). In Japanese, it is observed widely in most Eastern Japanese dialects. Based on the previous studies, this paper examines the following aspects:
- Internal constraints of the High Vowel Loss, like: i. location of the unstressed high vowel in relation to the stress, ii. Word and phrase structure, and iii. nature of the surrounding consonants.
- Frequency and lexical features, like: i. effect of the frequency and ii. lexicon-specific features.
I will examine the above two aspects with data of Japanese in Japan and the US. By comparing these two sets of data, this paper i. will present the realization of the High Vowel Loss, ii. will compare the realization of the phonological phenomenon the two settings trying to reveal more general patterns that determine its existence.
References
Gordon, Matthew (1998) The phonetics and phonology of non-modal vowels: a cross- linguistic perspective. Berkeley Linguistics Society 24: 93-105
Kondo, Mariko (1994) Is vowel devoicing part of the vowel weakening process? In Proceedings of the Edinburgh Linguistics Department Conference 1994, pp. 55-62 Topintzi, Nina, & Baltazani, Mary (2012). The acoustics of high-vowel loss in a Northern Greek dialect and typological implications. In P Hoole, et al. (eds). Consonant clusters and structural complexity, de Gruyter (Interface Explorations 26): 369-397
