INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Dialectal Characteristics of Osaka and Tokyo Japanese: Analyses of Phonologically Identical Words

Kanae Amino, Takayuki Arai

Sophia University, Japan

This study investigates the characteristics of the two major dialects of Japanese: Osaka and Tokyo dialects. We recorded the utterances of the speakers of both dialects, and analysed the differences that appear in the accentuation of the words at the phonetic-acoustic level. The Japanese words that are phonologically identical in both dialects were used as the analysis target. The results showed that the pitch patterns contained the dialect-dependent features of Osaka Japanese. Furthermore, these patterns could not be fully mimicked by speakers of Tokyo Japanese. These results show that there is a phonetics-phonology gap in the dialectal differences, and that we may exploit this gap for forensic purposes.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Amino, Kanae / Arai, Takayuki (2009): "Dialectal characteristics of osaka and tokyo Japanese: analyses of phonologically identical words", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 2303-2306.