This account of the phonology of Japanese and its major dialects presents original analyses of every aspect of the Japanese sound system, including its segment inventory, prosodic units, mora and syllable, prosody, and accent.

This volume is the first comprehensive handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology describing the basic phonetic and phonological structures of modern Japanese with main focus on standard Tokyo Japanese. Its primary goal is to provide a comprehensive overview and descriptive generalizations of major phonetic and phonological phenomena in modern Japanese by reviewing important studies in the fields over the past century. It also presents a summary of interesting questions that remain unsolved in the literature. The volume consists of eighteen chapters in addition to an introduction to the whole volume. In addition to providing descriptive generalizations of empirical phonetic/phonological facts, this volume also aims to give an overview of major phonological theories including, but not restricted to, traditional generative phonology, lexical phonology, prosodic morphology, intonational phonology, and the more recent Optimality Theory. It also touches on theories of speech perception and production. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to Japanese phonetics and phonology for all interested in linguistics and speech sciences.

This book gives true characters of Japanese speech sounds in reference to European speech sounds. When it was first published in 1931, it was the first book of its kind. There are only 5 Japanese vowel elements as opposed to 18 in English, 13 in French and 8 in German. There are 15 Japanese consonants, 26 in English, 22 in French & 23 in German. Because of the lesser number of elements, it follows that the wider range in vowels and consonants is heard by Japanese ears, so this volume gives average sounds uttered by Japanese in the twentieth century in relation to the English sounds.

This introduction to the sounds of Japanese is designed for English-speaking students with no prior knowledge of the language, and includes an audio CD which demonstrates the sounds and pronunciation described. An invaluable resource for students of Japanese wishing to improve their pronunciation, as well as those studying Japanese linguistics.

The first book-length treatment of Japanese phonology from the perspective of Optimality Theory.

Proto-Japanese is the reconstructed language stage from which all later varieties of Japanese, including Ryukyuan, descend. It has been studied both as an end in itself (as the genetic code of the Japanese language) and as part of endeavors to clarify the genetic affiliation of Japanese. Based on the state of the field, especially as represented in Samuel E. Martin's seminal work The Japanese Language Through Time (1987), this volume singles out key areas in the reconstruction of proto-Japanese where salient progress has been or promises to be made since Martin. Contributions were invited from scholars working on the following areas: segmental phonology, use of dialect evidence, accent, morphology, and syntax. While the book first of all presents new research which advances our understanding of proto-Japanese, it also gives an overview over the state of the art in the field and its main issues.

The papers in this tightly focused collection all report recent research on aspects of rendaku (‘sequential voicing’), the well-known morphophonemic phenomenon in Japanese that affects initial consonants of non-initial elements in complex words (mostly compounds). The papers include broad surveys of theoretical analyses and of psycholinguistic studies, meticulous assessments (some relying on a new database) of many of the factors that putatively inhibit or promote rendaku, an investigation of how learners of Japanese as foreign language deal with rendaku, in-depth examinations of rendaku in a divergent dialect of Japanese and in a Ryukyuan language, and a cross-linguistic exploration of rendaku-like compound markers in unrelated languages. Since rendaku is ubiquitous but recalcitrantly irregular, it provides a challenge for any general theory of morphophonology. This collection should serve both to restrain oversimplified accounts of rendaku and to inspire to further research.