Learning the language... again

Last week, I gave you something of an outline of where I live. Osaka is quite the interesting place to be, and not just because of variances from the established “norms” of Japanese society that can be found here. For me, one of the absolutely fascinating parts of living around Osaka is to have firsthand experience with a separate dialect of Japanese. No doubt, this is a result of my fascination with languages in general, and my studying of linguistics in college. If not for that, I might just find it a tad bit horrifying.

Picture if you will, a young man growing up in the North Country. We’ll call him “Bob”, because that’s my default name for hypothetical individuals (don’t ask). We North Country residents speak a fairly standard Northeastern US variety of English, with some Northern Cities Vowel Shift (noticeable particularly in words with a short “a”, which becomes something of an “ee-a” diphthong), and a tiny bit of Canadian Raising for some (if your “about” sounds roughly halfway between “a boat” and “a boot”, you belong to this group). All-in-all, it’s a pretty easy-to-understand dialect, which doesn’t stray very much from the generalized Midwestern accent that’s pictured as “Standard” American English. Now, imagine that this child of the North Country is an Anglophile, and is thus determined to spend time studying abroad (and maybe even living) in the UK. He applies himself earnestly to understanding the vagaries of the Queen’s English, learning about using the tubes for transport, driving a car with a boot and a windscreen on the left side of the road, and even taking a lift to one’s flat. And he’s all set to go… until the study-abroad program places him smack dab in the middle of Scotland.

Suddenly, all that studying is looking like it might have been for naught: the people around him speak something he is so completely unprepared for, that it might as well be a separate language altogether, and while people seem to understand him perfectly, relatively few seem willing to bring themselves down to his level just because he dinna ken any Scots. And so, with much resignation, he sets about learning the language… again… so as to be able to communicate effectively.

This encapsulates something along the lines of what I experienced in my first visit to Japan, back in 2006. While I had studied the language officially for two and a half years by then (and several years previous on my own), textbook Japanese only gets you so far in Osaka and Kyoto. Here, people have been happy speaking their own dialect for at least the entirety of Japan’s 1300-year recorded history (though it was the de facto standard for the first 500 years or so), and they see absolutely no reason to change that, just because some uptight politicians out in the eastern boonies (i.e., Tokyo) say so. And while the people I encountered understood full well what I was saying (since they learned Standard Japanese in school), that was no guarantee that I’d understand what they said back to me. Apparently, knowledge of a lingua franca does not necessarily mean that people actually feel obligated to use it. Combine this with the general assumption that my lack of understanding indicated incomprehension of Japanese as a whole, and you can see why I quickly made it my goal to learn to understand what the heck people were saying to me. (I’m particularly grateful for a little yellow book called Colloquial Kansai Japanese, which runs through the basics of the local idiom with tongue firmly in cheek.)

Armed with this knowledge upon my return to Japan, I have found that knowing the local dialect this time around really adds some profound enjoyment to living here in Osaka. Not only is it always good to understand what others are telling you, but people always seem to be pleased that I can communicate with them on their terms, in a far more natural style than the intentionally-artificial Tokyo Standard. It really makes you feel like a part of the place you’re in.

Of course, it’s not perfect: for one thing, while I’ve got a sense of the differences in vocabulary and grammar, I have a hard time with the intonation, which is substantially different from Tokyo Japanese. The result is that I sound like a Tokyo speaker trying really hard to be convincing in the dialect, and almost (but not quite) succeeding. Luckily, people seem to give me credit just for making the effort. The other thing, though, is that the dialect of Osaka is known throughout Japan as being the language of comedy. This is probably due to a number of things: its (relatively) relaxed approach to formality compared to Tokyo, the willingness of performers from Osaka to use their own dialect on stage, and (last but not least) the presence of the influential Yoshimoto Kogyo talent agency, based in downtown Osaka. And while I may not be pitch-perfect when I’m trying to speak the dialect, I’ve absorbed enough of its idiosyncrasies into my everyday speech that I unintentionally provoke laughter at times when I speak to people I know from Tokyo. I guess that’s something I’ll have to work on… though the people I stayed with in Tokyo helpfully assured me that “Osakans never learn to speak properly, no matter how long they stay here”. Such heartfelt encouragement…

By the way, this kind of thing is exactly why I have mixed feelings about the prospect of learning Chinese at any point. Being able to read the language is all well and good (as I can to a slight degree already, thanks to the use of Chinese characters in Japanese), but Standard Mandarin is only entirely useful when you’re in the northern part of the country. The varieties of Chinese spoken around places like Hong Kong and Shanghai are called “dialects”, but only by virtue of the fact that they all descend from the language of the Han Dynasty, spoken some 2000 years ago. This is in the same sense that French and Spanish are “dialects” of Latin (!), and they are about as distinct. That should give you some idea of why even I, with my love of a challenge, would hesitate to commit myself to it. In that respect, I guess I should be thankful for how “easy” I have it here in Japan.