The Level of "Awareness" and the Language Change-Tokyo Metropolitan Area Dialect-

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This research project aims to describe the relationship between a person's degree of ‘awareness' and the degree of ‘changeability' in terms of language change. By categorizing the linguistic patterns into the following four, I attempted to find out each pattern's characteristics : A.high awareness/high changeability, B.high awareness/low changeability, C.low awareness/high changeability, D.low awareness/low changeability.As a case-study of Category A, I studied features such as, ‘adoption of ‘Kansai-Dialect' by Tokyo native inhabitants', dialects found in text message ‘First Regional Dialect (Bo-Hougen)', ‘Rich First Regional Dialect (Jimo-Hougen)' ‘Fake Regional Dialect (Nise-Hougen)'). For Category C, I examined some accentual phenomena that have formerly been considered to be of Category D.Particular focus has been placed on ‘adjectival-conjugation-accented change'.With regard to intonation, ‘Tobihane-Intonation (New Rising Intonation)', which, partly correlates with ‘adjectival-conjugation-accented change' was studied. ‘Tobihane Intonation' is generally considered to be of Category B. The research also found that lexical items tend to be of Category A. Modish, or sentence-final, intonations are of Category A. Accents, as was expected, also showed inclination towards Category C. This finding about accents contradicts with the previous belief that accents would have the characteristic of Category D. This new finding about changeability, however, seems to occur when these accents are of the same accent type.