As anyone that has spent any time living in the same area of Japan can attest, the Japanese language is surprisingly malleable. Each of the major areas in Japan has little twists on basic Japanese ...

Japanese is a language surprisingly deep in regional variance. Today, though, standardization threatens dialects across Japan, particularly in tsunami-hit Tōhoku. Japan has a great number of dialects.

In 2009, eight languages spoken on the Japanese archipelago were listed among endangered languages in the UNESCO Atlas of the World, including Ainu, Amami, Hachijō, Kunigami, Miyako, Okinawan, Yaeyama ...

As local languages continue to disappear, Associate Professor Natsuko Nakagawa from the Faculty of Humanities is dedicated to documenting and preserving them while uncovering the linguistic principles ...

Using advanced imaging to visualize brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers, a new study finds that the pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates ...

Professor Koichi Shinozaki and his seminar students analyze issues based on evaluations obtained from users of the dialect chart, at Tokyo Women's Christian University in June 2021. (Photo courtesy of ...

As anyone that has spent any time living in the same area of Japan can attest, the Japanese language is surprisingly malleable. Each of the major areas in Japan has little twists on basic Japanese ...