Diversity of Expression in Regions Characterized by the Frequent Use of Dialects: Focus on the dialects used by nursing home residents in daily life interactions

This study aims to develop an application for teaching materials to facilitate the learning of dialects. Prior to the preparation of the teaching materials, a questionnaire survey pertaining to the Kumamoto dialect commonly used by nursing home residents, was circulated among the 40 Japanese nursing home employees. They were asked to convert the sentences written in Standard Japanese to the Kumamoto dialect, which is common among nursing home residents. 　The results from the dialect sentences used in meal contexts were analyzed in Wada (2022). In this study, “complaints with regard to pain/symptoms,” and “daily life” were analyzed. 　It was found that all the adjectives belong to the “ka” gobi dialect form in both “complaints with regard to pain/symptoms” and “daily life” contexts, which is the same as the results from meal contexts. 　Next, regarding grammatical elements, sentences including benefactive expressions in regional dialects such as “musume ga fuku o katte-kureta (My daughter bought clothes for me)” vary significantly. Because “kureru (do something for me)” also varies to “kureta (did something for me)”, “kure-rashita (did something for me)”, there are various combinations. 　This paper also verifies a phonetic variation in the suffix “gotaru”. “Gotaru” means (1) “no yo-da (it seems like)”, (2) “~tai (want to)”. The results of the questionnaire survey indicate that “gotaru” was spelled in several different ways because /ru/ sounds differently depending on the way it is pronounced. The Standard Japanese /r/ is pronounced with flap [ɾ] while the Kumamoto dialect /r/ is pronounced variously, such as retroflex [ɽ], omission or doubling of / r/ sound. As a result, “gotaru” varies in a number of ways, such as [gotaɾu][gotaɽu][gotaɽ][gotat][gotaʔ]. Orthographic variants are rarely seen in Standard Japanese. 　These results suggest that phonetic variation is one feature of the Kumamoto dialect.