Research
The Grammar of Kansai Vernacular Japanese
An example of the vernacular Japanese used in One Piece. Ruffy is saying, "Don't touch my hat!"
Kwansei Gakuin University Press
If you talk about Japanese culture from the perspective of a non-Japanese, then it will not be long before the topic of Japanese manga comes up. There are many famous manga, such as Dragon Ball and One Piece, that have been translated into a number of different languages. In many cases, these translation editions are the spark that ignites a love for Japanese culture. To such a person, there is perhaps nothing more appealing than reading your favourite manga in the original Japanese. However, even after several years of learning Japanese as a foreign language, there are still many expressions that are difficult to understand. For example, "任（まか）しといて！" Such everyday, run-of-the-mill vernacular grammar is not taught in the classroom, nor is it covered in textbooks.
I wrote A Grammar of Kansai Vernacular Japanese for students participating in the exchange student program at Kwansei Gakuin University. Such students tend to live in Japan with a host family for one year. During that time, they are exposed to a large amount of vernacular Japanese but they do not have any opportunity to systematically learn it due to a lack of learning materials. I wrote this book to fill that gap.
One of the main topics covered by this book is Kansai dialect. The Kansai dialect is continually changing with the passage of time. The current selection of books introducing the Kansai dialect focus exclusively on traditional Kansai dialect features. However, teaching expressions such as "金あらへんなんださかい、何も買(こ)おてへんねん" to exchange students is a waste of time. After all, Japanese university students do not speak such thick dialect any more. For that reason, the contents of this book are limited to the dialectal grammar and expressions actually used by young Japanese. Two examples are "やんか" and "や「何してんねん". In order to determine which expressions and grammar points are actually used by young Japanese, I collected over 100 hours of conversational data. That data not only formed the foundation of the Corpus of Vernacular Japanese, but also became the reference point for this book. Based on this data, each expression and grammar point is labelled for degree of usefulness. This way, beginning level students can concentrate on just the expressions that are the most useful.
The corpus data was also a source of example sentences. The book includes over 500 example sentences that illustrate the various grammar points. I tried to select example setences that were interesting and useful. Here are some examples.
恋愛か恋愛やないか分からない。 'I can't tell if it is love or not.'
気にせんといて。 'Don't mind!'
Other than traditional Kansai dialect, the book also covers vernacular Japanese that is not dialect. Expressions such as "なんか" and "みたいな感じ" are typical examples of the Japanese of the younger generation. Not only are these covered, but also vernacular grammar such 「って」 and 「的」, which in spite of their frequent use by Japanese, are can be quite tricky for non-native speakers to grasp.
分かってるよ、もう言うな、って！ 'I know! I told you to stop telling me!'
私的にあかんなって思うけど。 'In my own way, I think that it sucks.'
Finally, one more interesting topic that the book covers is abbreviations. Japanese tend to abbreviate proper nouns, such as the names of train lines and restaurants. On a university campus, students abbreviate the names of pretty much everything: the name of the university, building names, course names, and even club and team names. As one might expect, calling a building by a nickname is quite amusing to a non-Japanese.
Above all else, this book tried to introduce everyday vernacular Japanese. When you teach such Japanese to exchange students, they are delighted, for this is the Japanese that they are surrounded by on the streets and in the homes. When I introduce a new expression or grammar point in the classroom, I often hear, "Oh, I hear that all the time and always wondered what it meant!" I hope that book can be the key that unlocks the mysteries of vernacular Japanese for beginner and intermediate level Japanese learners.
Supplementary material --- Practice problems with answers
補足資料.pdfSome of the interesting resulted presented in this book
The unusual nature of polite Japanese verb endings
The following table shows the percentage of polite Japanese usage for various forms. The speakers seemed to have used polite Japanese about 5% of the time (e.g., 食べます). The other 95% of the time, they use the dictionary form ending (食べる). You can see this from the values for verb+ます, verb+ました and でした. They are all about 5%. However, です is used much more frequently---over 20%. This shows that です has special status in spoken Japanese. For example, speakers frequently use です with Kansai dialect forms, as in the following example.
めんどくさいことしよってんです。
Even more interesting are the results for the negative forms. It seems the speakers almost never use ~ません, even when speaking polite Japanese. The past tense form ~ませんでした occurs only once or twice in 100 hours of speech. So what do people use instead? They use ~ないです. Here is an example. Is this correct Japanese? Or does everyone speak broken Japanese?
あんまり見ないですね。
The sentence-final particle な
The sentence-final particle な is used in a similar fashion to the Standard Japanese sentence-final particle ね. Note that in spoken Japanese, this is the default or neutral particle. The table on the left shows that it is indeed the most-frequently used sentence-final particle. It is used by both men and women, and by both the younger and older generations. It is not particularly harsh, nor is it particularly rude. But it is also not soft, nor is it polite.
The sentence-final particle な, and it more polite version ね, show many interesting characteristics:
- When more than one sentence-final particle is used (example, ～けどな), they always come at the very end.
- They are the only sentence-final particles that can follow か. No other sentence-final particles can follow か.
- They can be used alone, with no other words. In such a case, they are normally lengthened, and said with emphasis.
～はる is disappearing
This form is an auxiliary verb used as an honorific expression. It is the Kansai equivalent of Standard Japanese honorific forms such as お休みになる ‘to rest, go to bed’ and 召めし上がる ‘to eat.’ It is used when talking about an action or activity performed by a person deserving respect. The form is not used when talking about your own actions or activities. This form has a very strong regional flavor to it, and it is not used outside of the Kansai region. Even within the Kansai region, the exact usage of the auxiliary verb varies slightly from location to location. Furthermore, this form is gradually disappearing from the local language. The following figure shows how frequently speakers of different ages used this form during the interviews. The figure shows that ～はる is seldom used by the youngest speakers.
Many forms have disappeared from the Kansai dialect. Following are some examples.
- さかい
- あらへん
- 儲かりまっか
Inspite of these disappearing forms, the Kansai dialect is used by everyone all of the time, and will not disappear. In fact, new forms are also being created, such as めっちゃ and やんか. Kansai dialect is perhaps the only traditional regional dialect outside of the Tokyo area that is still thriving and growing with new words.
Heffernan et al. (2018). Showcasing the interaction of generative and emergent linguistic knowledge with case marker omission in spoken Japanese. Glossa 3(1): 72. 1–24.
A lot of work has been done on case particle omission in Japanese. In this paper, we showed that case particle omission rates of を and に also depend on the compexity of the preceding noun phrase, and the frequency of the noun-verb pair. The left table shows that case particles tend to be omitted more frequently when the noun phrase is short and simple. The omission rate drops gradually as the the size and complexity of the noun phrase increases. The table on the right shows that case particle omission tends to occur more with noun-verb pairs that are highly dispersed (i.e., used frequently by a large number of speakers). Following are examples.
Complexity of the preceding noun
- Bare: ご飯を食べる
- Determiner: このご飯を食べる
- Adjective: おいしいご飯を食べる
- Na-adjective: 高価なご飯を食べる
- Relative clause: お母さんが作ったご飯を食べる
- Na-adjectival phrase: 王様の御馳走のようなご飯を食べる
Dispersion level (more dispersed expressions are used more frequently)
- 1 (not at all): 講座を申し込む、三輪車に乗る
- 2 (somewhat): ギターを弾く、風呂に入る
- 3 (quite): 話を聞く、気になる
- 4 (extremely): 何をする、学校に行く
Heffernan and Sato. (2017). Relative frequency and the holistic processing of morphology: Evidence from a corpus of vernacular Japanese. Asia Pacific Language Variation 3(1), 67-94.
This study presents ongoing changes in the morphology of the expression mitai-na 'similar to'. Based on apparent-time data, we argue that the morphological boundary between mitai and the attributive morpheme na has disappeared, and that this complex phrase is now processed as a single word. The top figure shows that sudden and rapid increase of the use of na after mitai. The bottom figure shows that amongst the younger speakers, the combination mitai + na is more frequent than all other na-adjectives + na counted together.
When young children are first exposed to language, they tend to learn whole phrases. Then over time, they learn to break up these phrases into parts. The most frequent components form the parts. Thus, a child will intially learn gohan taberu 'eat food' as a single phrase. However, since both gohan 'food' and taberu 'eat' occur frequently in other phrases, the child learns that these are individual words, and that the phrase gohan taberu is composed of two words. In the case of mitai-na, the decompostion into parts does not happen because neither mitai nor na occurs (relatively) frequently elsewhere.
Please contact me if you would like a copy of the paper.
Heffernan and Hiratsuka. (2017). Morphological relative frequency impedes the use of stylistic variants. Asia Pacific Language Variation 3(2), 200-231.
Sociolinguistic research has shown that speakers manipulate variants as they construct their speech style. Contrary to this expectation, this study introduces specific cases in which stylistic variation is highly constrained. We examine the verbal negative suffix in Kansai vernacular Japanese. We first demonstrate that this variable indexes speech style. However, in a few specific contexts, such as following the verb shir- 'to know', speakers overwhelmingly use a single variant. In this case, that variant is shira-n.
Why is shira-n so special? It occurs much more frequently than other forms in the same paradigm, such as shiru 'to know'. Complex forms such as the English word insane which occur more frequently than their bases (in this case, sane) are difficult to decompose into parts. We claim that this phenomenon also impedes stylistic variation for the verb shiru, as the form shira-n is not easily decomposed into a verb stem + a negative suffix.
In the following images, "SJ Index" is a general measure of how much Standard Japanese a speaker used during the interview. A circle represents one speaker. "Proportion SJ tokens" indicates the percentage of verbal negative tokens that are the Standard Japanese variant ない, as opposed to the Kansai variants へん and ん. A value of 1 represent 100% Standard Japanese. The histogram shows how many speakers (=frequency) used each proportion of Standard Japanese tokens.
The top left image shows the general relationship for verbs. There are two important observations. First, speakers who use more Standard Japanese also use more ない. This linear relationship is expected. Second, the speakers tend to use the Kansai variants へん and ん more than the standard variant ない. That is why frequency is higher on the left. However, the values spread out between o and 1.
The bottom image shows the relationship for shiru. Now we see that almost all of the speakers use 100% Kansai variants, regardless of how much Standard Japanese they are speaking.
