When you start learning Japanese online, understanding dialects can be both exciting and important. Japanese dialects are ...

Okinawa Prefecture, home of the Ryukyu Kingdom that was incorporated into Japan in the late 19th century, provides a time capsule of dialects that are in the brink of dying out in the modern age.

CHINA, Kagoshima Prefecture--The dominance of standard Japanese in colloquial speech across the archipelago has obvious advantages. But it comes at the risk of killing off rare dialects spoken on ...