Help with Japanese Dialects and Accents
Author: Richard
Q: Hello there ^_^ My name is Lynn, im learning Japanese off of the internet from various different resourses…(your site was a big help!) but all this is a little overwelming….. I understand that there are different dialects in japanese, i was wondering how many? Im from Huntsville Alabama, but living here all my life, and i can tell you that some one from Huntsville will talk differently from someone from Scottsboro AL, and those 2 will sound differnet from someone from birmingham, and those 3 ppl will talk diffent from someone from Tennesee… and this is within a radius of only 20-30 miles! I can only imagine its the same in the North. Can you give me anyhelp with the diffent dialects? i dont want to be speaking japanese in way too many dialects…. Thank you again for the site! - Genki in the Deep South, Lynn
A: Hi Lynn. The good news is that you don’t need to worry at all about Japanese dialects! There are some, but thanks to TV and a thing called “国語” (kokugo = national language) then everyone basically speaks and pronounces things in exactly the same way. So although a Scot, a Londoner, a New Yorker and Aussie would all pronounce “Mary”, “Marry” and “Merry” in different ways, in Japan everyone pronounces the sounds almost the exact same way.
What we do instead is to mess around with the ends of words. For example in Kansai they tend to add “hen” to the ends of words instead of “masen” so “shirimasen” (I don’t know) becomes “shirahen”. But it’s really easy to pick up and only really used in bars or with friends.
If you go into the really, really deep countryside you might food a few old ladies who speak exotic dialetics, but in my ten years of travelling every prefecutre in the country I’ve only ever come across one person who spoke so differently that I couldn’t understand. That was in the ZuZu area of Aomori where “hachi ji” became “hazizuzuzuzizuzuzuzzu” – don’t ask, I had no idea!
So don’t worry about it, just learn from any modern Japanese person and you’ll be fine!
Be genki,
Richard
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