"This is the first book on tonal change and neutralization. It covers a wide range of tone and pitch-accent languages in Asia, Africa and Europe, with a main focus on Japanese and Chinese dialects many of which are now endangered. In addition to presenting unpublished data, the book provides novel typological analyses of tone and neutralization"--.

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Tonal Neutralization
• Towards a Typology of Postlexical Tonal Neutralizations
• Postlexical Tonal Neutralizations in Kagoshima Japanese
• Tonal Neutralization and Lexical Category in Nagasaki Japanese
• Tonal Neutralization in the Ikema Dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan
• Accentual Neutralization in Japanese Dialects
• Chinese Tonal Neutralization across Dialects: From Typological, Geographical, and Diachronic Perspectives
• Part II: Tonal Change
• Towards a Typology of Tone System Changes
• Common Tone Sandhi Processes across Sino-Tibetan Languages
• Phonetic and Systemic Biases in Tonal Contour Changes in Bangkok Thai
• Bilingualism and Accent Changes in Kagoshima Japanese
• From Nyoro to Tooro: Historical and Phonetic Accounts of Tone Merger
• In Defense of a Dialect-contact Scenario of the Central Franconian Tonogenesis
• Index