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

摘要

This study investigates the characteristics of the two majordialects of Japanese: Osaka and Tokyo dialects. We recordedthe utterances of the speakers of both dialects, and analysedthe differences that appear in the accentuation of the words atthe phonetic-acoustic level. The Japanese words that arephonologically identical in both dialects were used as theanalysis target. The results showed that the pitch patternscontained the dialect-dependent features of Osaka Japanese.Furthermore, these patterns could not be fully mimicked byspeakers of Tokyo Japanese. These results show that there is aphonetics-phonology gap in the dialectal differences, and thatwe may exploit this gap for forensic purposes.