From: hiraga@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Yuzuru Hiraga)
Subject: Trivia on Japanese dialects (Was Re: Kansai, etc. info.)
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 09:24:05 GMT

Following are some trivia on Japanese and its dialects -
though they're all from memory, and I have no sources at hand.

In article <1992Sep7.222008.20655@news.cs.indiana.edu> "Michael Gasser" <gasser@moose.cs.indiana.edu> writes:
>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.

This is a fairly accepted theory that
[in the older days,] trends in the language would initiate in
the Kyoto/Kansai area, and sprawl outwards.  Thus the geographical
distance from Kyoto reflects chronological difference in language,
and the peripheral regions like Kyuushuu and Touhoku (especially Touhoku)
tend to retain older forms of Japanese.  E.g., some features of the
Touhoku dialect can be traced back to the Heian Era (ca. 8-11 C).

>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)...
>Differences within the Mainland dialects are much greater than the
>differences between, say, US and British English.

So an average Japanese, who can understand different dialects
to at least some extent, can be considered as multi-lingual :-)

Some other points.

* Kagoshima-ben, or Satsuma-ben, considered one of the most difficult of the
dialects, was actually artificially crafted and enforced by Satsuma-han
(han: provincial government) in or before the Edo era (ca. 17-18 C).
The intent was to discriminate aliens, in particular, Onmitsu i.e.
spies from the Edo (Shogunate) government.

* Apart from this, various dialects were formed and fixated because of
the isolationistic policy of the Edo government.  It was strongly forbidden
for ordinary people (especially farmers) to move among different han's.

* The current "standard" Japanese language (Hyoujun-go) is also
an intentional and semi-artificial invention of the Meiji Era.
This was derived mainly from "Yamanote-kotoba", which was prevailent
in the upper-middle class residing mainly in the western half of
the current Yamanote-line in Tokyo.  This in turn seems to take its
root in "Buke-kotoba" (language of the bushi=samurai class), and is
quite distinct from the native Edo-ben (Shitamachi-kotoba).
This is what is taught in schools, and spoken by broadcast announcers.

* In spite of the diversity in the spoken language (Kougo), the written
form of Japanese (Bungo) was uniform and also distinct from any of the
oral dialects.  In the early Meiji Era, there was a literary movement
that tried to unite the spoken and written forms (Genbun-icchi undou).
This eventually flourished in the works of Natsume-Souseki and other
great writers that followed.

* Upon foundation of the (notorious) Imperial Army, the officers were
soon alarmed that oral commands simply won't get through.  One reason
for this was the diversity of dialects, and another was in the general
characteristic of Japanese itself, especially the heavy use of ellipsis
(like omitting the subject noun when can be induced from context).
The army set out to inventing a military dialect of its own,
with characteristics like the unconventional and explicit use of the
first-person pronoun "jibun", sentence-completion forms using "dearimasu",
simplification/rejection of the complex honorific system, etc.
Newly recruited soldiers were immediately forced (often with violence)
to accustom themselves to this "Guntai-kotoba", and get rid of any
civilian traces in language.  The language itself proved effective,
but also would have contributed to detesting civilian life and values,
leading to the isolationism and self-righteous attitude of the army.

This phenomenon however, is quite common -- it is often the case that
self-contained societies/communities develop argots and slangs of
their own, discriminating themselves from others.  A well cited example
is the slangs used by Sushi-shokunin's.

So much for now.

-Yuzuru Hiraga