Endangered and Lesser-Studied Languages and Dialects – serie

Japanese is definitely one of the best-known languages in typological literature. For example, typologists often assume that Japanese is a nominative-accusative language. However, it is often overlooked that Japanese, or more precisely, Tokyo Japanese, is just one of various local varieties of the Japonic language family (Japanese and Ryukyuan). In fact, the Japonic languages exhibit a surprising typological diversity. For example, some varieties display a split-intransitive as opposed to nominative-accusative system. The present volume is thus a unique attempt to explore the typological diversity of Japonic by providing a collection of grammatical sketches of various local varieties, four from Japanese dialects and five from Ryukyuan. Each grammatical sketch follows the same descriptive format, addressing a wide range of typological topics.

This book examines the diverse prosody of compound nouns in Kansai Japanese, with a special focus on a class of compounds with particularly variable prosody, whose unique prosody is potentially endangered due to their structure and influence from Tokyo Japanese. These compounds serve as important evidence for recursion in prosodic structure in theories of the syntax-prosody interface, as they simultaneously resemble not only other compound words but also non-compound phrases, making them valuable test cases for compound prosodic structure. This book discusses potential reasons for these compounds' prosodic variabilty and what may condition their unique prosody, based on results from novel fieldwork. A unified account of compound prosody in Kansai and three other Japanese dialects is also presented.

Western Subanon Grammar is the first ever comprehensive description of Western Subanon, a highly endangered indigenous Austronesian minority language in the southern Philippines. Written by a native speaker and the result of intensive fieldwork, the book's 26 chapters cover the phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse properties of the language. Special attention is devoted to the salient grammatical features of Western Subanon, including symmetrical voice, relative clauses, ellipsis, and scope. The volume also makes available numerous examples online through Kaipuleohone, the digital linguistic archive of the University of Hawaii.