From: "Michael Gasser" <gasser@moose.cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: Kansai, etc. info.
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 22:20:00 -0500

ccavers@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Cam Cavers) writes:

>Could anyone post an overview of the major different dialects in Japan, and how
>they relate to the flavour of Japanese that is taught in North America? With
>all this talk about kansai, kantou, etc, I'm more than a little lost...

>!   *  *  * *    *    ! Cam Cavers: ccavers@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca !SakeSake
>!   *   *      ****** ! **************************************** !SakeSake
>!  *     *      *   * ! Member of B.A.K.A.: Banzai Anime         !SakeSake
>! *      *     *   *  !                     Klub of Alberta
!SakeSake!

This would take forever.  Japan is really a very linguistically
diverse (and interesting) place.  A summary of the dialect differences
for English readers is provided by Masayoshi Shibatani in his _The
Languages of Japan_ (the "languages" of the title are Ainu and
Japanese, by the way).  The details are not agreed on, but one major
breakdown is as follows:

                        Japanese


      Ryu^kyu^                             Mainland


                            Kyu^shu^    West     East    Hachijo^


"West" includes the Kansai dialects that have been discussed here,
"East" the Kanto^ dialects such as To^kyo^.

There's also a peripheral-central breakdown that overlaps the above
breakdown so that as you get farther away from the Kyo^to-To^kyo^ center,
things change but tend to resemble each other to some extent.
So there are strange similarities between Kyu^shu^ and To^hoku dialects.

If you include Ryukyuan, Japanese is much more like an entire family
of languages within Indo-European (Romance, Germanic) than like a
single language (French, German).  And amazingly, the distinctions
with the Ryukyuan dialects are at least as great as those within all the
Mainland dialects.

Differences within the Mainland dialects are much greater than the
differences between, say, US and British English.  The distinctions
are on the level of phonology, grammar, and of course lexicon.  Within
phonology, there are dialects with 7 vowels and 3 vowels rather than
the 5 of most dialects.  Within consonants, many dialects make more
distinctions than Standard Japanese (for example, some distinguish
/kwa, gwa/ from /ka, ga/), and some (e.g., Kagoshima) permit
syllables or words to end in consonants other than /N/.  There are a
number of different accent systems, including some that make more
distinctions than Standard/Tokyo (e.g., Kyo^to/O^saka) and a few
dialects with no accent (e.g, Kumamoto).

In grammar, all of the dialects basically look like Japanese, but
there are some oddities.  Some dialects, as in Old Japanese,
distinguish attributive verb forms ("the man who writes") from
conclusive ones ("the man writes").  And some, again like Old
Japanese, use "no" in place of "ga" and/or "ga" in place of "no".
There are also lots of differences in the details of verb inflection,
some already mentioned for Kansai.

If you're interested, there is a three-volume dictionary of Japanese
dialects as well as serious dictionaries of a number of individual
dialects.  The dialects of Japanese seem to have been a quite active
area of investigation in Japanese linguistics.

As another poster noted, one wonders how long the dialects will last,
though, given the effects of TV.  (The same thing is happening in other
countries as well, of course.)


-- 
=========================================================================
Michael Gasser				Assistant Professor
Indiana University			Computer Science, Linguistics,
Computer Science Dept., LH215		Cognitive Science
Bloomington, IN 47405 USA
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan