I have tried to ask people this type of question on many occasions and the
answer is always the same, but people are notoriously bad at evaluating their
own language, so I ask here:

Apart for pitch, which I know will differ significantly from region to region,
what kinds of phonetic or phonological differences are there between the
different dialects of Japanese, particularly between Kansai and Tokyo?

For instance, I'm always told that if a person from Osaka spoke with Standard
Pitch Accent, they would sound exactly like a person from Tokyo, that there is
essentially no other difference. Except I know there are slight differences,
such as with devoicing. Does anyone know more about this?

* * *

**EDIT:** I'd like to be more specific. In a context where a native speaker of
Kansaiben says a word or phrase that either sounds the same in standard
Japanese, or where he happens to use standard Japanese, provided he gets the
pitch right, are there typically any sounds that would tend to be pronounced
differently and that would give away that person as a non-native speaker of
Tokyouben, for instance?

If an American from New York and another from New Orleans say the same phrase
they are unlikely to sound the same, even if they naturally used the exact
same words. I'm wondering if the same concept of "accent" can apply to the
pronunciation of particular sounds within Japanese dialects, specifically
Kansaiben.
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pronunciation dialects phonology kansai-ben phonetics
Except for pitch, what are the differences in pronunciation between Kansaiben and Tokyoben?
There are some significant differences between Kansai-ben and what you see in
textbooks, I'm not sure where you would get the idea that the _only_
difference was in pitch emphasis. There are some very significant pitch-
differences, but that's not the only change. (Personally, I felt the pitch
changes were much easier to notice in Kyoto, but that might have been just me)

Probably the most noticeable aspect of kansai-ben to the new learner is
swapping copula だ for や.

Volitionals tend to be clipped (many extended おう-sounds actually tend to be
clipped). The end of words where the vowel sound changes (such as on 形容詞) will
often be turned into an extension of the first vowel sound in informal
language. On the other hand, several short words end up being extended, such
as is shown in the second half of [this
video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9pyxscra1w) focused on the simple body-
part words.

The hyoujungo pauses introduced by small-っ will sometimes be replaced with a
long vowel in kansai. This change will also often include a vowel change from
before the っ of い or あ to う or お.

There is also some vocabulary which is simply unique to the area.
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As you have already picked up on, the intonation (change in pitch) of words is
vastly different.

A common example is the pronunciation of the word 日本.

> Osaka:  
>  _Starts high, and pitch lowers_  
>  にほん【HLL】
>
> Standard:  
>  _Starts low, and pitch raises and then lowers_  
>  にほん【LHL】

However this is not the only difference between Kansai-ben and Standard
Japanese, here are some other differences regarding pronunciation.

  * Speakers tend to pronounce the usually silent う at the end of words such as です/ます.
  * There is a tendency to replace the M sound in some words with a B sound. A common example is the word さむい which is pronounced さぶい or even just さぶ。
  * The extended pronunciation of some vowels (長音), is ignored in some cases. A common example is in the volitional form of verbs. どこか行こうか would be pronounced どこか行こか.
  * The copula だ, becomes や, and as such だろう becomes やろう.
  * Words can be vastly different. おもしろい/おもしろくない becomes おもろい/おもない. しんどい is used instead of つかれた. I think even the names of some fish can differ in kansai-ben.

Kansai-ben even has it's own keigo forms of verbs, and multiple other verb
conjugations unique to the region.

As you can see, Kansai-ben is not just the intonation/pronunciation of words.
If someone from Osaka were to speak with standard Japanese intonation, they
would sound very much like someone from Osaka.

This kind of question pops up quite often, maybe it deserves its own community
wiki page?
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The different pitch accent patterns is easily the most noticeable phonetic
difference when you look at the _Kansaiben_ dialects (and it's important to
mention that this is a group of dialects rather than a single dialect with no
internal regional variation), so it's easy to conclude that this is the only
real different _in pronunciation_ between standard Japanese and Kansaiben.

If I understand correctly you are not interested in the many differences in
vocabulary and grammar between the two dialects, so I'll stick to phonetics
and phonology.

In the realm of basic phonology, modern Kansaiben seems to maintain more or
less the same phoneme distinctions as standard Japanese. It doesn't have (or
at least I'm not aware of) distinctions that don't exist in standard Japanese
such as distinguishing an extra consonant or vowel sound.

When Kansaiben does seem to differ phonologically, it's usually deeper into
the territory where these phonological differences may have already morphed
into vocabulary differences. Kansaiben has a noted tendency to extend short,
one-mora words (a lot of which are body part names), into two-morae words by
lengthening the vowels. Oddly enough, these words also may have different
pitch accents depending on the word, so めぇ (目, _eye_ ) has a LH pitch, while
けぇ (毛, _hair_ ) has an HL pitch and ちぃ (血) blood bears a flat HH pitch. In
standard Japanese there are only two possible pitch patterns for these words
and they can both be properly distinguished only if some particle follows that
word (because the pitch accent is relative and can only be distinguished when
hearing the pitch rising or falling).

While short-vowels in one-mora words are lengthened, long vowels are sometimes
shortened (as in the long O-form of verbs) and conversely again, a っ (small-
tsu) sound is often replaced by lengthening of the previous vowels. But both
of these changes are not as regular or sweeping as the previous one, and they
seem to fall more properly into the realms of vocabulary and grammar.

Sometimes the boundary between phonology and vocabulary becomes quite murky,
and this seems to be the case here. Even the lengthening of one-mora words,
which does seem to be sweeping, is probably not an enforced phonological
constraint anymore, since practically any young (as in younger than 50 years
old :)) Kansaiben speaker can easily say these words without lengthening the
vowel, and in fact most do just that when they speak standard Japanese. This
is actually a tendency you everywhere in the modernized world, where mass
media and higher mobilization has caused people to be bilingual in both their
dialect and the standard language. This means that even if your dialect lacks
some phoneme that is present in the standard language, when you borrow that
word into your dialect you're much more likely to keep this phoneme as-is,
since you can pronounce it anyway.

But there is one phonological feature of Kansaiben (besides the accent) which
is strikingly different from standard Japanese and cannot be attributed to
vocabulary: _devoicing of vowels_.

I think the [video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9pyxscra1w) jkerian linked
makes this quite apparent: when Tokyo Chicken and Osaka Dog pronounce 箸
(chopsticks), they don't only differ by the pitch accent they use, but also by
how much they elide the last vowel of the word. Tokyo Chicken sometimes
discards the vowel completely (saying [haʃ] instead of [haʃi]), but Osaka Dog
will always pronounce it.

In general, devoicing of the vowels /i/ and /u/, which is so common in
standard Japanese, is much more rare in Kansaiben. What's more interesting, is
that even if it does occur, it may not necessarily occur in the same places as
in standard Japanese, since the pitch accent does have [some
influence](http://hasegawa.berkeley.edu/Accent/0099.pdf) on whether a vowel
gets elided or not. In this case, if Tokyo Chicken would have said 箸 with the
same pitch accent as Osaka Dog (or if it just said 橋 or 端 in Tokyo dialect,
like it did later), the vowel /i/ would never get devoiced.
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If I'm understanding your question correctly, you are asking about differences
in phonology between Japanese dialects, except pitch accent and vowel
devoicing.

Since you're especially interested in Kansai-ben, one that I can think of is
the slight differences in [how /g/ is
pronounced](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Weakening). To
summarize it roughly, many eastern speakers have [ŋ] as an allophone of /g/,
while the majority of western speakers do not. However, I don't think that
this in isolation is enough to mark a speaker as western (if everything else
is pronounced in standard Japanese), since some eastern speakers don't use [ŋ]
as an allophone og /g/ either.

If we include other dialects than kansai-ben, I can think of a few others:

[Some dialects of Japanese do not base their pronunciation on moraic
units](http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=sD-
MFTUiPYgC&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=are+all+japanese+dialects+moraic?&source=bl&ots=hlLhb5yK-C&sig=kNhXo_9UUOnX84w2p02yZqR3ok0&hl=ja&sa=X&ei=PobOUPPWFIiHmQWLv4HgBQ&ved=0CGMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=are%20all%20japanese%20dialects%20moraic%3F&f=false).
I would assume that if a speaker's dialect doesn't have morae, then even if
pitch, devoicing and everything else was standard Japanese, they would have a
hard time getting the mora-based rythm right.

[Some Tohoku dialects pronounce し and す etc.
similarly](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E5%8C%97%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80#.E9.9F.B3.E5.A3.B0.E3.83.BB.E9.9F.B3.E9.9F.BB).
The Wikipedia article doesn't go into too much detail, but I would imagine
that such speakers would have difficulty pronouncing these as in Standard
Japanese, even if they got pitch and devoicing right.

There are probably many subtle differences like this, but hopefully this can
get you started.
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The only two non-pitch differences of pronuncation I know of are the
pronunciations of う, ん, and the sokuon. The "u" sound in Kansai-ben is as in
European languages and pronounced with rounded lips, not with compressed ones.
This also means that lots of devoicing doesn't occur, since "u" is now a quite
strong sound. Kansai people sometimes even say ～ますうう or ですううう though that is a
bit of an exaggeration.

Kansai-ben is much more moraic than Kanto dialect, so ん and っ really do take
up one full mora. In Kanto it's more like ん takes up half a mora and the vowel
before it is lengthened to 1.5 moras (i.e. かんじ is like "ka-an-ji"). Same with
the sokuon (だって is like "da-at-te, this is _very_ obvious in songs). Kansai-
ben treats them as full moras, and even pitch accent stress can go upon ん.
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You already had several good answers, so I'll just comment here with a very
nice table detailing most of the differences between all major Japanese
dialects:

日本語の方言の比較表:
<https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%AE%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80%E3%81%AE%E6%AF%94%E8%BC%83%E8%A1%A8#.E4.B9.9D.E5.B7.9E.EF.BC.88.E8.A5.BF.E6.B5.B7.E9.81.93.EF.BC.89>
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This isn’t exactly pronunciation, but my friend from Tokyo and I, from
Britain, were confused about リーヨ, and apparently it is a Kansai dialect for
-るよ and/or an exclamation like よ.

Hope this adds to your knowledge!
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