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Language Lineage

Mainland Japonic

Japanese together with Hachijō. Already in the 8th century Old Japanese had a western (Nara) standard and eastern dialects, and Hachijō descends from the east.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentKyushu, Shikoku and Honshu, and the Izu Islands
On this page
  1. West and East
  2. Dialects and Accents
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points

01

West and East

The earliest Japanese texts reflect the western dialect of the Nara court. The great 8th-century poetry anthology, the Man'yōshū, also preserves Azuma-uta ('eastern songs') and poems by eastern frontier guards (sakimori) in a noticeably different Eastern Old Japanese. Modern Japanese descends mainly from the western variety. Hachijō, spoken on islands south of Tokyo, keeps some features of the eastern one.

02

Dialects and Accents

Modern Japanese is far from uniform. Its traditional dialects divide broadly into eastern and western groups, with Kyushu often treated as a third, and speakers from rural Aomori and Kagoshima would once have struggled to understand each other.

The east–west line, running roughly through the mountains of central Honshu, shows in everyday grammar. Eastern dialects, including Tokyo, form the negative with -nai and use the copula da: ikanai 'don't go', sō da 'that's right'. Western dialects use -n or -hen and ja or ya: Osaka ikahen, sō ya.

Accent varies even more. Tokyo and Kyoto–Osaka both have pitch accent, but their systems differ, and a word that is high-pitched at the start in one is often low in the other. Parts of southern Tohoku, northern Kanto and central Kyushu have no distinctive accent at all, while Kagoshima dialects have just two accent patterns, determined by the whole phrase rather than the word.

Since the Meiji era, schooling, radio and television have spread the Tokyo-based standard, and most Japanese people now speak it alongside a regional variety, or instead of one. Regional speech has not disappeared: Kansai speech in particular remains a confident and widely heard variety.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. JapanJapanese c. 120 million · Hachijō a few hundred

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. SplitBy the 8th century CE

    Western and Eastern Old Japanese

    The Man'yōshū records Eastern Old Japanese poems alongside the western court language, showing an old dialect division within mainland Japonic.

    Sources (1)
    • Frellesvig, Bjarke. 2010. A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.