Chapter 7
Regional Stereotypes and the Perception of
Japanese Vowel Devoicing
Midori Yonezawa Morris, Gettysburg College
- Introduction
Vowel devoicing in the Tokyo dialect is a common topic in Japanese phonol-
ogy. A general description of such devoicing (e.g., Vance 1987) notes that
the high vowels /i/ and /u/ are devoiced between voiceless consonants, as in
/kikan/ “time period” and /kukan/ “linear section,” and between a voiceless
consonant and a pause, as in /hon desu/ “It’s a book.” Studies of different
aspects of devoicing in the Tokyo dialect have been extensively reported, but
devoicing in non-Tokyo dialects, like the Kinki dialect, spoken in the Kyoto-
Osaka area, has not yet been as fully studied; it is widely believed, however,
that devoicing does not occur in Kinki. In fact, although previous studies are
limited, devoicing in Kinki may occur as frequently as in Tokyo, at least in
the environments described previously. This suggests that the general belief
about devoicing in Kinki and actual pronunciation may be contradictory.
Some sociolinguistic studies have reported that people can ascertain
language varieties based on speech samples but that their judgments can be
affected by social information, such as gender, ethnicity, and region (e.g.,
Niedzielski 1999). In Japanese, accentuation, for example, which is formed
by the placement of high pitch on a mora, is phonemic, and different pitch pat-
terns in words with the same segments are clues to different varieties (Warner
1997). Devoicing experiments, in which the participants are asked to make
judgments about which variety they hear, may not be as de¿ nitive because of
the allophonic status of devoicing and the possible gap between general belief
about and actual pronunciation in Kinki. In making judgments on a speaker’s
region, if Tokyo respondents use devoicing to identify Tokyo and nondevoic-
ing to identify non-Tokyo, and if Kinki people relate devoicing to non-Kinki
and nondevoicing to Kin ki, then they act ually hear allophonic differences and
use them as clues, but they also use regional stereotypes rather than actual
regional use.