ABSTRACT
Reflecting the phonological features of the language, Japanese sociophonetics has paid special attention to phonetic phenomena such as accentual variation, intonation patterns, vowel devoicing across regional dialects, social groups, and styles. In reviewing the major works in Japanese sociophonetics, we first look at its historical developments, which can be divided into three phases: the 1940s to 1970s, the 1980s to early 1990s, and the 1990s to the present. We then focus on significant works on three major topics in Japanese sociophonetics: vowel devoicing, prosodic variables (including lexical pitch accents and intonation), and voice quality. As a case study, we show how the voice quality of Japanese anime can be analyzed in the sociophonetic manner. The final section discusses the future direction of Japanese sociophonetics.
