Lecture: Linguistic Transformation and Awareness: The Case of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area

March 21, 2005

Lecture: Linguistic Transformation and Awareness: The Case of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area
Tanaka Yukari (Associate Professor, Nihon University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Lecture in Japanese

Accents have usually been regarded as a feature of language that is slow to change compared to other aspects such as vocabulary, phonemes, and grammatical forms. While being hardly noticed by speakers, the accents of adjectival conjugational forms are in fact susceptible to change. Taking up the case of the Tokyo metropolitan area in the past 100 years, Professor Tanaka examines the complex patterns of accents for adjectival forms and considers the transformations of accents in terms of standardization (out of existing local dialects) and the creation of a new local metropolitan dialect.