Japanese Language. Haruhiko Kindaichi

cannot be understood in nearby Hachij

jima!

      Differences existing among Japanese dialects can be seen best in the accents of words. It is well-known that the accent of words like aka meaning “red” and “dirt,” and hashi meaning “chopsticks” and “bridge” are quite the reverse in T

ky

and in the Ky

to-

ky

and Ky

to

saka districts where accents are distinguishable and that there are also districts with no distinguishable accents whatever shows how varied Japanese is.

The origin of dialects

      Thus, marked differences exist among Japanese dialects. Why? The Basque language, which I have mentioned, is famous for its varied dialects. Les Langues du monde states that the results of investigations by a Lord Bonaparte showed that the Basque language was divided into three dialect groups and fifty dialects, and under them twenty-five subdivisions which again had fifty varieties and more than ten minor divisions.¹ We cannot tell how many dialects there were in all. In the East, reports have come frequently about one small island in the Pacific with many dialects which differ greatly from each other. Although Guadalcanal island, the scene of heavy fighting in World War II, is only about eighty by twenty-five miles in area, twenty Melanesian dialects are spoken there.² There is likewise a certain area in Australia with only a few thousand people but more than two hundred dialects.³

      Generally speaking, divergences in dialects are conspicuous among primitive tribes which are small, closed societies. Even in Japan, when we watch children who are not yet attending school, we find that there is one society in every tiny block, and children living in one block cast menacing glances at the children from the next block as they pass by. This is a microcosm of primitive society. Thus, it is natural that differences arise among dialects.

      Is, then, the large number of greatly differing Japanese dialects due to the primitive state of Japanese society? Perhaps, but there are also other, more cogent reasons. One of these is the antiquity of Japanese history which stretches back at least to the time of Christ, if not before. It was in the later half of the 15th century that the Russians overthrew the Kipchak-khan and established the Russian Empire. It was in the second half of the 18th century that the ancestors of the Americans established the United States on the American continent. Compared with Japanese history it seems that all this took place only a short time ago. And only thereafter did Russian and American English spread throughout the two countries. Thus, there was not enough time for these languages to split into different dialects.

      Yet another cause for the appearance of so many different dialects in Japanese is the difference in the way of living in each locality. Coupled with the complexity of geographical features and the diversity in climate, there was great variety in the mode of living. In his account of travels in the United States, Yoshikawa K

jir

, a scholar in Chinese literature, states that in his train journeys through the continent the yellow wheat fields stretched on endlessly, and when he entered a forest there was nothing but a dark forest no matter how far the train went. He was astonished by the immensity. Russia must also be the same. What a contrast, then, to the Japanese Ministry of Education’s railroad song, Ima wa yamanaka ima wa hama . . . (Now we are in the mountains, now along the shore . . .), a description of scenes viewed from a train window. In Japan one finds, in rapid succession, farm villages, fishing villages, industrial cities, and mining towns, where people separate into even smaller groups in the course of making a living. Since speech is controlled by the mode of living, it is natural that different dialects should develop.

      An investigation of Izu peninsula dialects revealed that the contrast between northern and southern or eastern and western Izu dialects was not so great as the contrast between the dialects spoken in fishing villages and farm villages. When Umegaki Minoru made a survey from the northern part of Wakayama prefecture to the Shima district of Mie prefecture, passing through the Kumanonada coast districts, he discovered that even in such widely scattered districts as Saigazaki of Wakayama city,

shima island across from Kushimoto, and the southern coast of Shima, there was a remarkable similarity in the speech of the fishing villages.

The standard language and the common language

      Thus, one of the chief characteristics of Japanese is the great divergence among dialects. This brings about various inconveniences in the social life of the people. There are many dialectical expressions which cause misunderstandings among people of different districts, which the kygen (a N

comedy) “Irumagawa” well illustrates. A T

ky

man traveled to Saga on Ky

ky

).” “Then how about Hikari?” the man said. “Nai,” said the woman again. He gave up and returned to his lodgings, where he was told that nai meant “yes” in the local dialect. A person from the Kansai district made the mistake of arranging to meet a person from Chiba prefecture on shiasatte. In Kansai, shiasatte generally means the day after asatte (asatte is the day after tomorrow), but in Chiba, Saitama, and Gumma prefectures, it means two days after asatte.

      Japanese are not insensitive to the divergences between dialects. They devised a polished version of the T

ky

dialect and made this the standard language to be taught at schools. The diffusion of this speech throughout Japan has met with great success. People who speak the standard language or the T

ky

language exclusively are few, of course, but almost all the people of Japan can speak this common language with which they are able to make themselves understood by people of other districts. According to a survey made by Shibata Takeshi, even the Hachij

jima islanders, who formerly