Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at the analysis of the evolution of the phonological and grammatical features of the traditional Tokyo dialect. The results of an online survey have shown that it is possible to claim a certain continuity between the traditional Tokyo dialect and the present-day Tokyo speech.

Paper long abstract:

There is a widespread opinion about the absence of dialectal features in the speech of Tokyoites, often shared by the inhabitants of the Japanese capital themselves. However, as the analysis of written sources has shown, it is possible to claim the existence of the Tokyo dialect (Tokyo hogen), at least until the second half of the 20th century. The main goal of this paper is to analyze to which point traditional phonological and grammatical dialectal features are conserved in modern Tokyo.

Firstly, we carried out a linguistic analysis of written evidence (the scripts of interviews conducted by Akinaga Kazue in the 1970s in Tokyo) and established a list of traditional Tokyo dialectal features to be further examined in present-day speech of the younger generation of Tokyoites.

Secondly, we designed a dialectal questionnaire and conducted an online survey whose participants were 20-35-year old Tokyoites. As the survey was conducted in 2021 during the period of pandemic when it was quite complicated to enter the country. That is why the field data was collected online by means of Google forms. The number of participants, who met the conditions of the survey, was 70. As the lexical and pragmatical features of Tokyo speech has been already investigated by other researches, we decided to focus the questionnaire on phonological and grammar features.

According to the responses of the participants, all the dialectal features have been distributed in 4 categories: highly stable, stable, unstable, highly unstable. The results have shown that despite a high instability or complete loss of the majority of traditional dialectal features, there are still several highly stable ones. Also, some new dialectal features have been detected. Therefore, it can be said that even at the present moment the dialectal character of Tokyo speech can be justified, and moreover a certain continuity between the present-day Tokyo speech and the traditional Tokyo dialect can be established.