MAKING RYUKYUAN DIALECT MAPS AND A COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL DIALECTOLOGICAL STUDY

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A body of researchers including this group has been carrying out a dialectological investigation into the entire area of the Ryukyu archipelago for many years, and the study has come close to completion. In the first and second years of this project, we conducted an investigation into Kyushu dialects which are presumed to be most closely related historically to all the dialects of the Ryukyu archipelago, and in particular into the dialects of the southwestern parts of Kyushu including those of many isolated islands. Eighteen communities were investigated in this survey. The questionnaire was the same as the one employed in the investigation into the dialects of the Ryukyu archipelago. We are planning to undertake the same type of investigation extending it to all the localities of the Japanese archipelogo next year and in the years to follow.For the third year (i.e., the last year of this current project). we have examined how to cope effectively with the large quantity of data resulting from the above-mentioned research and investigation--how to databank in particular the phonetically transcribed dialectal data of each community investigated and how to make them into dialect maps. Recently the technology of language information processing has been highly developed and computers, their software and accessaries have come into wide use and have dropped to favorable prices. This is encouraging news for our project which could not have been envisaged several years ago. But, even so, we have left some important problems to solved in the future. This is because, unexpectedly, we were much behind in developing the ways of processing the enormous amount of dialect data. We had been restricted in accomplishing an effective outcome by the lack of means to transcribe various phonetic symbols, which were unavailable on conventional fonts and software. We are now concentrating our efforts on solving these problems.