Mood Suffix and Question Intonation in Ryukyuan

Manifestation of the question intonation was investigated for Ryukyuan which is an endangered language. Ryukyuan is related to Japanese and is known to preserve a number of linguistic features that were present in 6 to 8 th century Japanese. Ryukyuan is typologically interesting since the mood suffix takes the role of intonation. Though a language with such a mood suffix has been reported in linguistic literature, studies of intonation in such languages are rare. Ryukyuan has basically the same intonation for all the sentence types and a classical dichotomy of sentence final rising vs. falling intonation for interrogatives vs. declaratives does not apply to this language. Instead, the predicate verb ends with its accent type, i.e. falling or flat, unless the accent is deleted for focus manifestation.