The Japanese language and the Japanese people: intricately intertwined helpmates
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-second issue:
“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.
PROLOGUE
Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.
Although you could hardly guess it now, there was a time not very long ago when Japanese could not communicate so easily with each other, and in some cases not at all. Go back only a couple of hundred years, say—or maybe not much more than a century and a half or so—and we see in Japan a spread-out, Balkanized country, separated into groups of localized communities almost completely out of touch with each other. Most people living in the islands then had never met, much less talked to each other. In other words, Edo Japan was strikingly different from that hypermodern, interconnected place at the forefront of technological development we’re used to seeing today. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan was a backwater, left behind in the changing world events of that formative period.
Western forces besieged the country, just as they did other vulnerable Asian nations in the nineteenth century. But while its neighbors remained internally fragmented, militarily and economically weak, taken advantage of and colonized by outside powers, Japan changed rapidly to become a member of the first world order, an economic and military equal of America, Germany, France, Russia, and Britain. Unlike other non-Western nations, Japan drew its people together and met threats with strength. No other country in the world was able to accomplish that. How did Japan manage to transform itself in such a short period of time?
One factor in Japan’s modernization that isn’t usually given enough credit for what happened is the extent to which the country reshaped its language. Without unifying and adapting its language to serve the country’s modernization efforts, Japan could never have accomplished what it did. It was essential.
But those changes did not happen by themselves. Nor were they inevitable. The stories of what the Japanese did about their language and what happened as a result are what we want to take a look at here.
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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
- "The many varieties of Japanese regional speech" (3/24/20)
- "Dialectology of Japanese reflexive exclamations" (1/8/17)
- "An Eighteenth-Century Japanese Language Reformer" (4/23/15)
- "Intelligibility and the language / dialect problem" (10/11/14)
- "Japanese dialects" (Wikipedia)
- "Stigmatization of dialects" (9/25/17)
- "Royal language" (9/25/15)
- "Writing from the Age of the Gods" (5/26/21)
- "The Ramsey hypothesis" (6/27/22)
Chris Button said,
December 30, 2025 @ 8:18 pm
Looks like it will be an interesting read. I have one question after reading the start:
Is there any consensus around where the pronunciation Nihon rather than Nippon came from?
The standard shift of p- to ɸ- to h- in 本 would not have occurred with -pp- (hence Nippon), so why is Nihon now standard? A colloquial or dialectal form going mainstream perhaps?
anon said,
December 30, 2025 @ 9:22 pm
Japanese today is still indeed made up of many different local dialects that sometimes unintelligible due to vocab, usages, honorific rules differences. But the main core of the language such as phonology, morphosyntax, general lexicons remain highly unified.
Japanese is also very straightforward and simple from a linguistic point of view. Very few irregularities. The nouns are not marked for person, number, and gender. Nominative-accusative, pretty mainstream and easy to grasp. Verbs and nouns sometimes are fluid, and verbal morphology consists of mostly enclitics that have no morphophological quirks. Only two tenses. Clause structure is always verb-final, but pro-drop. No number/person, directional marking per se.
Rodger C said,
December 31, 2025 @ 10:42 am
Chris Button: I've read that the pronunciation "Nippon" became skunked by its use in shouted fascist slogans.
David Marjanović said,
December 31, 2025 @ 1:01 pm
That doesn't explain why "Nihon" exists in the first place, only why it came to be preferred.
Tom said,
December 31, 2025 @ 8:41 pm
I just skimmed #372. It's interesting, but it contains a common bias, which is that Japanese history more or less started with Commodore Perry. Even the discussion of Furukawa Koshoken is presented as "Isabella Bird before Isabella Bird". However, the rise of standardized Japanese must be tied to the sankin-kotai system of pre-Meiji Japan. The alternate attendance system had daimyo traveling to Edo and living there for half their lives, spending the other half in their provincial capitals. Likely, this was the origin of Furukawa's bias against provincial dialects–the sankin-kotai system likely created an upper-class standardized dialect based on the shared communication of the daimyo retinues living together in Edo. It would be interesting to see an academic treatment of this. (I bet it exists in Japanese.)
Tom said,
December 31, 2025 @ 8:47 pm
Incidentally, my wife can switch back and forth between standard Japanese and her local sub-division of Kansai-ben, and her father (from Tokyo) can't understand her when she's speaking the dialect. He, who grew up in central Tokyo, speaks a Tokyo dialect that is different from standard Japanese. I have also heard a northerner break into her home dialect which her Kansai listeners couldn't understand.
My friend from UK can switch back and forth between his heavy London accent and a kind of American-UK hybrid accent that is very easy for Japanese to understand.
As a native speaker of the imperial standard American, I have never been faced with being incomprehensible, and I don't understnad this ability to switch back and forth between dialects.
Rodger C said,
January 1, 2026 @ 10:22 am
David M: I believe that [SUN] as a Sinitic borrowing can be either nichi from *nit, or plain ni. So *nit-pon > nippon; *ni-pon > nihon. I defer to those who actually know Japanese.
Fieldham said,
January 1, 2026 @ 1:30 pm
Tom: That "upper-class standardized dialect" you refer to is basically what Nomura Takashi 野村剛史 has written about using the term kinsei sutandādo 近世スタンダード (roughly "early modern standard language"), for instance in his 2013 book 日本語スタンダードの歴史. Not sure whether there's much English-language research on the topic out there, but the idea is taken up in section 2 of this paper: https://doi.org/10.69382/actaasiatica.111.0_75
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2026 @ 5:14 pm
That was an informative read!
It made me think back to when I was living in the Tōhoku region in my mid-to-late teens. Two things stick out for me:
– /g/ was completely indistinguishable from /ŋ/ unless in word-onset position.
– the volitional suffix (e.g. in structures like "let's [vb]") was occasionally -be or -ppe.
Chris said,
January 3, 2026 @ 8:04 am
For some reason, the name of the local dialect just popped into my head: "Kesengo" (Kesen dialect/language).
Chris Button said,
January 3, 2026 @ 8:06 am
For some reason, the name of the local dialect just popped into my head: "Kesengo" (Kesen dialect/language).