Linguistic Variation in Japanese. Dialects : Dialects in show variation on many levels, in terms of Linguistic Variation in Japanese. Dialects : Dialects in Japanese show variation on many levels, in terms of pitch accent, vocabulary, morphophonology and conjugational morphology. Although whole books have been written upon Japanese dialectal variation (see Iitoyo et al. 1986, and Tokugawa 1979 as examples), and an in-depth discussion here would be impractical, what follows are some examples of these differences.
A example of pitch accent differences between different dialects A classic example of pitch accent differences between different dialects can be seen by looking at the phonemic homophones of hashi ‘edge,’ ‘bridge,’ and ‘chopsticks’ (based on Vovin, 2003, in-class notes) in which the alternation of low and high pitches vary from dialect to dialect.
