Apparently this is a more dialectally isolated term, but in some dialects of Scottish English (among others), this means “a song or poem, a strain of a song or a repeated verse,” which I quite like.
Anyways, there is an Old English term for “poems or song” which is alternately recorded as either leoþorléoð.Within the language at that point, there were several nice compounds such as léoðcræft,“poetry, the craft of song” andléoðorún“wise counsel or advice sent through song or poems” (which was apparently a thing they needed a word for?)
This is most often attributed to the PIE root leu-, an onomatopoeic root for expressives and interjections. Interestingly, this is also the base for the Latin term laudāre, which through a separate linguistic thread gives us the modern English term laud, “praise, glory, reknown, etc.”
I work in Hakodate, in Hokkaido, the prefecture of ‘People who speak Japanese nobody can understand’. Besides the general dialect of the Hokkaido region, there are also some differences between cities. Hakodate has it’s own dialect and accent. For Japanese people, these dialects are not easy to identify. For me? I couldn’t tell if it hit me with a brick.
Even though I’ve learnt Japanese for a number of years, speaking and listening was never my strong point. Hakodate is the first place where I’m actually in a situation where I listen to Japanese every day. When I got here, to me there was only two types of Japanese - Japanese I could understand, and Japanese I couldn’t understand.
When I came hear, when people spoke Japanese I couldn’t understand, I just assumed that my Japanese wasn’t advanced enough to understand. It didn’t occur to me that they might just have a thick accent, or better yet, be speaking completely in dialect.
I have a colleague who has been working here for about 30 years, and everyone remarks on how he speaks in an obvious Hakodate dialect. To me, I couldn’t tell the difference. Then just this year a new colleague came from Osaka. I could tell he spoke in a Kansai dialect because the intonation was a little different, and also because he would say things like ’分からへん’ instead of ‘分からない’. But one day I caught a really interesting conversation between him and the school administrator.
Her: If you don’t mind me asking…you don’t sound like you come from Osaka. You sound like maybe you’re from Kyoto instead?
Him: Oh yea, I was born in Kyoto.
So apparently he was born in Kyoto, moved to Tokyo at around elementary school age, moved back to Osaka after university to work there for 10 years. AND STILL, people could tell he was not only from Kansai, but specifically from Kyoto.
That’s really interesting! I live in Kesennuma and people here use んだ too. None of the other ones look familiar, however.
I was just talking a Japanese friend who were saying that because of the curling joshi (from Hokkaido(?)) at the Olympics, the way they say そうだね was starting to catch on. My friend said the equivalent in Kesennuma would be だがら (だから in standard Japanese), but she didn’t think that was cute enough to catch on. I don’t hear a whole lot of strong regional accent where I live, but it seems like the trend is to put dakuten (vocalization) on a lot of syllables that wouldn’t normally have it. I wonder if it’s because I mostly talk to teachers at school, and maybe they try to use standard Japanese since they’re teaching children.
I think it’d be cool to have a regional accent, but I’m kind of scared to try and incorporate it into my Japanese. Maybe if I lived in the south parts of Japan where the dialect was stronger. (Or maybe I do have one and I just don’t know…)
I work in Hakodate, in Hokkaido, the prefecture of ‘People who speak Japanese nobody can understand’. Besides the general dialect of the Hokkaido region, there are also some differences between cities. Hakodate has it’s own dialect and accent. For Japanese people, these dialects are not easy to identify. For me? I couldn’t tell if it hit me with a brick.
Even though I’ve learnt Japanese for a number of years, speaking and listening was never my strong point. Hakodate is the first place where I’m actually in a situation where I listen to Japanese every day. When I got here, to me there was only two types of Japanese - Japanese I could understand, and Japanese I couldn’t understand.
When I came hear, when people spoke Japanese I couldn’t understand, I just assumed that my Japanese wasn’t advanced enough to understand. It didn’t occur to me that they might just have a thick accent, or better yet, be speaking completely in dialect.
I have a colleague who has been working here for about 30 years, and everyone remarks on how he speaks in an obvious Hakodate dialect. To me, I couldn’t tell the difference. Then just this year a new colleague came from Osaka. I could tell he spoke in a Kansai dialect because the intonation was a little different, and also because he would say things like ’分からへん’ instead of ‘分からない’. But one day I caught a really interesting conversation between him and the school administrator.
Her: If you don’t mind me asking…you don’t sound like you come from Osaka. You sound like maybe you’re from Kyoto instead?
Him: Oh yea, I was born in Kyoto.
So apparently he was born in Kyoto, moved to Tokyo at around elementary school age, moved back to Osaka after university to work there for 10 years. AND STILL, people could tell he was not only from Kansai, but specifically from Kyoto.
My own journey has been completely unconscious. I only started getting confirmation that I might be speaking in a dialect when I was ordering ramen from a (fellow) foreigner in Tokyo. I said a word, I can’t remember which, but I said the word with the last syllable unstressed. In Hakodate, I realised afterwards, it happens often, our last syllable tends to sound like it’s floating upwards. Anyway, the ramen guy looked at me and stressed the last syllable for me.
And just today I was telling my colleague, whose a Hakodate local, about why I wanted to visit a certain attraction. I said, ‘妹が好きだからさ′ (’Because my sister likes it’) and she was like ‘Hehe, you’re starting to speak Hakodate-ben now eh?’
I had no idea that ‘だからさ’ was Hakodate dialect! Maybe it isn’t specifically but the way I pronounced it. It amused me. It shouldn’t be shocking that I’m speaking in a regional dialect, as a Japanese learner I had always figured that I’d learn ‘Japanese’ - without considering that hey, Japanese is not just one standard thing.
As a Chinese Singaporean this should have been more obvious to me. I don’t speak the standard Beijing dialect which is so commonly thought in language schools. It is, to my ears, even a little ticklish. I remember when I was studying New York, one of the guys in my class was Taiwanese. We were the only two Chinese speakers in our Japanese class. During break, the Chinese class students in the room next to us were reciting sentences out loudly, and the Taiwanese guy and I just looked at each other across the room and started laughing. A unique bonding experience in a foreign country.
Of course, it’s not that the Beijing accent is funny or inferior to either of our accents. It’s, as I said, the most standard. I mean, one could argue that we are the ones who speak bastardised Chinese. But it was just the fact that to us, the Beijing accent is very thick (a lot of ‘tongue-curling’) and distinct.
But that’s the beauty of languages. Even while knowing the Mandarin Chinese of my country, there’s still so many dialects and accents out there. My dad can very easily identify which prefecture a Mainland Chinese comes from, despite growing up in Malaysia. This fascinates me a lot, and it has to do with interacting with Chinese speakers from many regions.
Perhaps one day I would be able to be that advanced in my learning of Japanese that I’d be able to hear a person speak and go ‘Oh, you’re from that city!’ That’s certainly my goal. And to me, there’s no problem not learning ‘standard Japanese’. Mostly because it’s usually limited to the spoken side of things, and also because I’m quite easily influenced (or adaptable, if you wanna spin in positively).
What about you, as a Japanese learner, do you think it’s a must to learn ‘standard’ Tokyo-spoken Japanese first?
