Introduction

Northern Bizkaian Basque and Tokyo Japanese are genetically unrelated, but their tonal phonologies are strikingly similar. Both languages have lexical tone, although no tone needs to be included in underlying representations if words can be marked for accent. The vocabulary is divided into accented and unaccented words and roots. Affixes may influence the accentuation of the resulting word, causing accents to be assigned or deleted. Compound formation will similarly impose various accent patterns. In Japanese, further deletions may occur postlexically at the phrasal level. Accents that survive in the surface representation will be provided with a pitch accent, which is H*L in both languages. Intonational tones will complete the surface representation. The Japanese system played a crucial role in the development of the metrical–autosegmental model (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988) and greatly influenced the descriptions of Basque on which the account in this chapter is based.

The prosodic constituents of Basque and Japanese do not include the usual phonological word (ω) and phonological phrase (φ). Instead, descriptions refer to the Accentual Phrase (α) and the immediately dominating Intermediate Phrase (ip). The α is typically larger than the ω of many European languages. The ip is comparable to φ in size. Above the ip, there are the usual intonational phrase (ι) and the utterance (υ), though only one of these will be relevant in the account of each language.

This chapter describes a Basque dialect belonging to a group that is spoken within a band of approximately 10–15 km along the Bizkaian coast, in towns like Gernika, Ondarroa, Lekeitio, and Arteaga, further referred to as Northern Bizkaian Basque.