How Many Japanese Accents Are There? A Quick Overview of Japanese Dialects and Their Regions

How many Japanese accents or dialects are there? Are the mutually intelligible? Where did they come from?

If you have been living in Japan for a while – or have had a lot of exposure to Japanese – You may have noticed a variety of different accents. While we can’t possibly hope to teach you all of these dialects in one blog post, we can at least help you distinguish between the major ones.

Hopefully, after reading this blog post you will be able to at least differentiate between them. And maybe even pick up some Osaka-ben along the way ;).

So How Many Japanese Dialects Are There?

Japan has a long history of being closed off from the rest of the world. Additionally, even within the country there were long periods of isolation in the regions and islands. This is part of why Japanese today has so many different regional dialects.

The short answer to the question is: we don’t know for sure. There are so many that differ slightly (not to mention older small villages all over the country that have their own accents)  that’s pretty much not possible to pinpoint them all.

A common way that people catagorize Japanese accents is across the major regions. So for the sake of being concise, that is what we will do in this article.

Major Japanese Dialect Regions

The primary – or standard – Japanese is most likely the type of Japanese that you have learned. Standard Japanese (Tokyo dialect) is the Japanese taught in schools, textbooks, and used in Japanese mainstream news and media.

An important Japanese dialect you should familiar yourself with is the Osaka dialect.

The Osaka dialect is a 関西弁 (かんさいべん – a dialect from West Japan) that sounds very different from the Tokyo (or standard) dialect.

Most speech is informal, and particles are dropped similar to Tokyo dialect’s タメ語 (casual speech).

Another big difference with Osaka dialect is it’s grammar. For example, negative verb endings are changed from ない to へん.

Example:

くれない→くれへん
行かない→行かへん

How to Tell Them Apart

Since there are so many regional accents in Japan (and we were only able to touch on some of the main ones!) it can be rather difficult to tell them apart. However, if you have a pretty good grasp of the main dialects, you should be able to get a good idea of the general region of the speaker’s origin. Pay attention especially to sentence endings and particles – these are helpful clues to determine regions.

Just like with any other language, learning to tell the various Japanese regional dialects apart takes time and practice. But if you train your ear enough – you will be able to tell them apart like a native!

Are They Mutually Intelligible?

For the most part, yes. If you are a native/standard Japanese speaker.

For a non-native speaker they can be very difficult to understand – to the point of almost sounding like another language. For example the Tohoku dialects (東北弁) are so different it sounds almost like a different language. Learn more about the Kansai dialect on this blog post!

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