Japanese Pitch Accent - Other Dialects

Other Dialects

Accent and tone are the most variable aspect of Japanese dialects. Some have no accent at all; of those that do, it may occur in addition to a high or low word tone.

The dialects which have Tokyo type accent, like the standard Tokyo dialect described above, are distributed over Hokkaido, northern Tohoku, most of Kanto, most of Chūbu, Chūgoku and northeastern Kyushu. Most of these dialects have a more-or-less high tone in unaccented words (though first mora has low tone, and following moras have high tone); an accent takes the form of a downstep, after which the tone stays low. But some dialects, for example, dialects of northern Tohoku and eastern Tottori, typically have a more-or-less low tone in unaccented words; accented syllables have a high tone, with low tone on either side, rather like English stress accent. In any case, the downstep has phonological meaning and the syllable followed by downstep is said to be "accented".

Keihan (Kyoto–Osaka)-type dialects of Kansai and Shikoku have nouns with both patterns: That is, they have tone differences in unaccented as well as accented words, and both downstep in some high-tone words and a high-tone accent in some low-tone words. On the periphery of Japan, in parts of Kyushu, northeastern Kanto, southern Tohoku, around Fukui, around Ōzu in Ehime and elsewhere, nouns are not accented at all.