Kansai Style Conversation and Its Role in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

This paper considers Kansai style conversation, addressing the following questions: What are the properties of Kansai style conversation in contemporary Japan? What is Japanese people’s assessment of Kansai style conversation, and are there any regional differences in this aspect? In this paper, Kansai style conversation will refer not only in a narrow sense to Kansai- or Osaka dialect markers such as pitch accent, grammar or vocabulary, but also in a wider sense, to pragmatics and interactional humor elements such as boke, tsukkomi, furi, and ochi. Data for this paper is derived from a questionnaire and interview survey of 131 Japanese native speakers living in the Kansai area (originating from all parts of Japan) regarding their perceptions of Kansai style conversation, conducted by the author in 2012. The results show that in the majority of families from the Kansai area, as well as in-groups consisting of people from Kansai, there is some kind of boke- and tsukkomi interaction. We can infer from the data that non-Kansai Japanese have only a passive knowledge of the properties of Kansai style conversation. In other words, active competence in boke and tsukkomi is learnable, but difficult to fully acquire if not raised or long situated in Kansai.