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Japanese Dialects
There are dozens of dialects spoken in Japan. The plurality is due to the mountainous island terrain and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, morphology of the verb and adjectives, particle usage, vocabulary and in some cases pronunciation. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.From the northern island of Hokkaido to the southern islands of Okinawa, Japan is rich in various regional dialects. The Japanese dialects can be divided into the Eastern and Western dialects.
While the Easterners say "yano-assatte" (the day after tomorrow), "shoppai" (salty) and "-nai" (not), the Westerners use "shi-asatte," "karai" and "-n" or "-nu." The consonants are more emphasized in the East, whereas the vowels are more carefully pronounced in the West. And the Japanese high-low tonal accents sometimes take different forms between the eastern and western dialects.
The dialects of Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto and the eastern part of Chubu are the Eastern Dialects, while those of the western part of Chubu (including Nagoya City), Kansai (including Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe Cities), Chugoku, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa are the Western Dialects. The Japanese common language used to be based on the dialects of the Kansai region, but since the 17th century is based on the dialect of Tokyo in the Kanto region, as Japan's political and economic centre moved from Kyoto and Osaka to Edo, present-day Tokyo.
Extremely geographically separated dialects such as Tohoku-ben and Tsushima-ben may not be intelligible to other dialect speakers. The dialect used in Kagoshima in southern Kyushu is famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects in northern Kyushu as well.
The Ryukyuan languages used in and around Okinawa bilingually mostly by the elderly are related to Japanese, but the two are mutually unintelligible. Due to the close relationship they are still sometimes said to be only dialects of Japanese, but linguists consider them to be separate languages.
However, recently, Standard Japanese have been prevalent nationwide some because of TV. Young generation usually speak mixed language of standard and local dialects.