Changes in Dialect Usage Across Generations in the Osaka Dialect of Japanese

Sociolinguistic research on Japanese regional dialects has generally found that regional dialects are assimilating to Standard Japanese, but that recently an increase in the popularity of dialects has led to reverse trends of “de-standardization” as well. This paper aims to utilize quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of Osaka dialect interviews in order to observe how usage of the dialect differs across generations. The quantitative results find that some dialect features are falling out of use among younger generations, while others stay consistent, and some features are actually used more by younger speakers than middle-aged generations. The qualitative analysis then examines the ways in which individual speakers of various ages switch between dialect and standard forms strategically in order to add additional meanings to their speech, demonstrating the complex linguistic evolution of the Osaka dialect.