Yanagawa (Fukuoka, Kyūshū Japanese)

Abstract

The Language and Its SpeakersThe Yanagawa dialect (Yanagawa, hereafter) is spoken in Yanagawa City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyūshū (Figure 9.1).The Kyūshū dialects are divided into three main groups depending on their syntactic, lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic features: the Honichi dialects spoken in the east, the Hichiku dialects spoken in the northwest, and the Satsugu dialects spoken in the south (Kamimura 1983: 7-8). Yanagawa belongs to the Hichiku dialect group (Okano 1983: 85). Yanagawa is similar to other Hichiku dialects in that it has two series of nominative markers -ga and -no in both main and subordinate clauses, and in the use of the sentence-final particles -bai and -tai. On the other hand, it is distinguished from the neighboring dialects by its use of the honorific affix -mes-and the interjection nomo (Okano 1983: 65). There are few previous studies about Yanagawa and they (Fujiwara 1952, Takano and Tanaka 1972, Matsunaga 1973 have focused only on some sentence-final particles and vocabulary items. The author has written a sketch grammar of Yanagawa in Japanese as her master thesis (Matsuoka 2021). This chapter is a heavily revised version based on newly collected data as well.At the end of July 2020, the population of Yanagawa City was about 65,000, of which about 15,000 were in their 70s or older and likely to speak the traditional Yanagawa dialect fluently. The younger generations usually speak Standard Japanese or a version of the Yanagawa dialect which is strongly influenced by Standard Japanese. There are differences between the Yanagawa dialect spoken by the older generations and that spoken by the younger generations. For example, the older generations use the suffix -ka as a non-past suffix for verbal adjectives ( §6), while the younger generations use -i, which is the same form as Standard Japanese. In the present chapter, the author focuses on Yanagawa spoken by the older generations. The data presented in this chapter are the author's field data. The data were collected from two consultants, HK and YM. HK is female and YM is male, and both of them are in their 80s.