Japanese accentuations by foreign students and Japanese speakers of non-Tokyo dialect

The study presented is the first attempt toward a unified theory of Tokyo dialect accentuation acquisition by non native speakers of Japanese and by Japanese speakers of non Tokyo dialect, i.e., speakers from Ibaraki prefecture in Japan. The data are analyzed with regards to the interim accentual system which will be produced in the acquisition process and will be different from that of the mother tongue (dialect) or that of the target language (dialect), and which is called interlanguage (S.P. Corder, 1981) or interdialect (P. Trudgill, 1986). The characteristics of both interlanguage and interdialect were examined and it was found that all subjects seemed to have created the same system under the strong influence of their target language accentual system