Regional differences (or lack thereof) in rendaku in Japanese surnames

Abstract

No study has thoroughly investigated the regional differences of Japanese compound voicing known as rendaku. The present study addresses this issue by conducting a large-scale web-based survey with 492 Japanese speakers as participants and 1,776 compound surnames as stimuli. The results show no clear effects of dialects on rendaku application. This raises a novel theoretical issue for further investigation: Even though pitch accent has been argued to be inversely associated with rendaku (e.g., Sugito 1965; Zamma & Asai 2017), dialects with a variety of accentuation patterns nonetheless exhibit very similar voicing patterns in compound surnames. A tentative account based on foot structure is proposed.