The Diminishing Dialects of Japan
The surprising reason the youngest generation is leaving local language behind
Japan is a land of local dialects. Standard Japanese (hyōjungo), the language of the Tokyo area, is what’s taught in classes and textbooks, but it’s not how everyone speaks around the country.
Living in Kobe, in the Kansai region that includes Osaka and Kyoto, people speak a distinct dialect known as Kansai-ben, which is quite different from standard Japanese. Thank you is arigatou in Tokyo, but ookini on the streets of Osaka. “Hontou desu ka?” in standard Japanese is “Honma kai na?” in Kansai.
If you’re studying Japanese from a textbook, you’re learning standard hyōjungo. Living in Kobe, that was a problem. People could understand me speaking in Tokyo Japanese, but I couldn’t understand them.
As you travel around the country, you encounter a variety of distinct dialects that become more pronounced as you leave the cities for the countryside.
Disappearing Dialects
With the advent of radio, and later with television, people across the country became accustomed to hearing standard Japanese. It was expected that dialects would die off. Surprisingly they haven’t, at least not yet. But that may now be changing.
Sure, local people everywhere, from the biggest cities to the most remote islands, have no difficulty understanding speakers of standard Japanese. And people who work with clients around the country learn to switch to standard Japanese for business as a kind of second language.
But, for the most part, people never stopped speaking their local dialects at home and among friends. As you walk around Osaka and listen to the conversations, everyone is speaking Kansai-ben except in formal settings.
This even applies to children. Young kids learn the local dialect from their parents and friends and speak it as their first language. Then they learn standard Japanese from school textbooks and television as a kind of second, formal language.
Recently, though, the situation seems to be changing. I recently spent some time with family in Kobe that includes kindergarten and early elementary school kids. While the parents were in one room, speaking Kansai-ben amongst themselves, the kids were outside playing with each other and screeching in standard Japanese. That was surprising.
Where were they learning their language from? It wasn’t from their parents. It turns out they were learning to speak from YouTube, TikTok, and social media.
My membership in the American Statistical Association will surely be revoked for drawing any conclusions from an anecdotal sample set of one. Unfortunately, I haven't found any studies of dialects in the age of social media that I can mine for data and conclusions. So I’m going to make a provisional hypothesis based on what I observed. It might be right or wrong and is certainly overly simplistic. Parents in the room — please contribute your own observations.
There’s no question kids are emulating what they see on YouTube. That’s what kids do. That’s how they learn. My generation watched television. We learned from Sesame Street and Chibi Maruko. We imitated Kermit the Frog and Tama-chan. And then we spoke in our local dialect the rest of the time. So why are kids now, at least the ones I saw, leaving the local dialect behind?
A developmental psychologist almost certainly has a better answer than me, but I have a theory. I think there is something about social media that is more engaging to our brains than television.
Television doesn’t feel real. It’s being broadcasted at us. We’re watching, enjoying, and learning, but mentally, we’re not engaging. (Except for my father who screams at the news anchors and baseball manager and gets angry when they don’t follow his orders.)
Social media is fundamentally different. We’re not just watching but liking, commenting, and sharing. We’re joining communities. We’re interacting. These people feel like our friends (or our enemies on Twitter). We’re building what feels like relationships in ways we never did with television.
Perhaps that’s what makes social media so addictive, for adults as well as children.
And being part of that online community means speaking the same language. For kids in Japan, that means speaking the standard hyōjungo Japanese. I’m guessing the same phenomenon is playing out everywhere else in the world.
Kids around Japan seem to be learning standard Japanese as their first language now, the one they use with friends, and the local dialect from their parents as a kind of fussy old people’s way of speaking. It’s easy to imagine that as they grow up, they’ll gravitate to speaking mostly hyōjungo.
That will be a sad day for me because I love Kansai-ben. It’s the language of the streets. It’s more fun, more expressive, and more dynamic than the stiff Japanese spoken by bureaucrats in the capital. Hyōjungo has its place, but Japan will become a lot more boring if that’s all that everyone speaks.
Want to learn how to speak in Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe? Get my book on Kansai-ben and sound like a native.
