Can a Kyoto person listen to a Hokkaido person speak and think, “Oh, he must be from Hokkaido?”
In general, yes, Japan is a linguistic 64-pack of Crayola crayons. However, Hokkaido-ben is probably not the best example. It’s not that distinct and doesn’t have that many regionalisms. It’s not uncommonly taken for a light dusting of Tohoku-ben.
Absolutely. My daughter studied in Osaka and said the Osaka accent is not only distinct, but is often used as a stereotype in Japanese entertainment, much like a Brooklyn accent in a U.S. movie.
Not only are the accents distinctive from region to region, but there are major dialectal differences as well. My father-in-law speaks the Osaka dialect that kunilou mentioned.
The reason Hokkaido dialect/accent is not as distinct is that Hokkaido was colonised by speakers of Japanese relatively recently, so has not developed its own regional accent to the same extent as places where Japanese has been spoken since time immemorial.
FYI: It is worth noting that Okinawaan (sp?) is different yet again from Mainland Japan as the history (and culture) of these people is different from mainlan Japan.
Definitely. As of right now, the kansai-ben (Eastern dialect, mostly of Kyoto/Osaka) is considered the cutest, most fashionable dialect right now. If I recall correctly, there is an inverse on stress for many words (for example, speakers in Tokyo would pronounce chopsticks as HA-shi and people in Kyoto would pronounce it ha-SHI.) There are also differences in verb endings among the dialects too, and many areas have grammar that is unique to the local area. A combination of all these factors make it very easy to have a general guess of where a speaker hails from.
What about accents across class? Would it be easy to guess whether someone was nobility or burakumin, for example?
Keep in mind that those maps are grossly oversimplified.
As other people have mentioned, there are regional pronunciations/variations in words used that are so different from standard Japanese that they are incomprehensible to people outside the region. And in some cases the regions are tiny, as in people 30 miles away can’t understand them.
Wait, what? Really? So most of Japan pronounces chopsticks as HAshi and bridge as haSHI, but it’s reversed down there? What about candy vs rain? Were most things like this reversed, or was it more words that don’t have homophones?
Hmmm, while I am not sure if it’s an accent persay, but differing class levels definitely use different vocabulary and speak with differing politeness levels. While I admit ignorance as to how burakumin speak, blue-collar and white-collar Japanese are very distinct and even a beginning speaker would be able to hear a difference.
I’m learning Tsugaru-ben (Hi-5’s BRBSCS), and it has traditionally been considered an extremely hickish dialect. It’s recently gotten a bit of a popularity boost due to a national commercial making a parody comparison of it to French, but yeah, to echo what others have posted, when spoken really thickly, it can be completely unintelligible to your average Tokyo-ite.
I had heard a story that at the end of World War II when the Emperor came on the radio for the first time ever to announce Japan would surrender and “endure the unendurable,” one of the ironies was that many of his subjects couldn’t understand what he was saying. Don’t know if that’s true or an exaggeration, though.
Is there any language that does not have regional accents? I doubt it. And let’s not count languages with only a handful of speakers, where “regional” is not applicable.
At least for me, though, it’s odd to think of Japan as having such regional variations, given its perceived emphasis on homogeneity.
Well, you can’t fight human nature that much. Especially given the divisions along the various islands. It would only be in the relatively recent decades that the technology would be available to even attempt to enforce a single dialect on the people, and I can’t imagine it being successful. We’re talking about a nation of some 125M people.
Who are divided by a metric fuckton (fT) of mountains.
FYI/Nitpick: It’s “per se.” (“Intrinsically” – as opposed to, for example, “per accidens” – “by circumstance”)
There are regional accents and then there are regional dialects that are nearly incomprehensible to one another. Many countries have regional accents. It’s less common to have places like Japan that have so many dramatically different regional dialects. By analogy look at the Iberian peninsula that has several dozen full-fledged languages that are arguably more similar to each other than many dialects of Japan.
Some words have different pitch accents in Kansai than in Tokyo (hashi is an example. Others that spring to mind are “terebi” and “ima”). But I don’t think it’s a rule that pitch accents are reversed between the two dialects, it’s just random as far as I know.
OK, well what about the hashi case? Do you know if bridge is reversed, or are both pronounced haSHI? It blows my mind a little to know that one of the ways to distinguish homophones is different down there.
If anyone else is curious as to what I mean and I’m not explaining myself well, it’d be like an English speaker saying “I’m going to the grocery store to buy some proDUCE.”