Handbook of Japanese Dialects

This volume is the first full-fledged handbook of Japanese dialects in English. The study of Japanese dialects has a long tradition, and significant contributions have been made in many subfields of linguistics such as geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, philology, phonology, accentology, grammar, and lexicology. While Japanese dialectology is heavily influenced by the Western developments in the field, some original domestic achievements have also been made based on the meticulous fieldwork, the compilation of dialect dictionaries, and the painstaking mapping of dialect features in a large number of dialect atlases. However, most publications of Japanese dialect studies have been in Japanese, allowing only a handful of foreign specialists to take full advantage of the achievements in Japanese dialectology. This volume fills this gap making the Japanese dialect data and their analyses accessible to a wider audience and also informing dialectology specialists as well as sociolinguists in general of the methods of Japanese dialectology and its achievements to date. This volume deals with the mainland dialects (including the Hachijo dialect). Because of the recent trend of considering Ryukyuan languages as sister languages, rather than dialects, of Japanese, a separate handbook is dedicated to them in this series.