This website is dedicated to the Tsugaru dialect (Tsugaru-ben). The goal is to make this site into a detailed resource for the dialect.
Dialect Overview - This contains general information and features about the dialect.
Dictionary - A small dictionary of common and interesting Tsugaru-ben words.
Click Here to visit the Matsunoki corpus of the Tsugaru dialect, which consists of trees that include syntactic and morphological analysis, based on folktales narrated by native speakers of the dialect.
Tsugaru-ben is a dialect spoken in the Tsugaru region of Japan. The Tsugaru region is on the west side of Aomori prefecture, the northernmost prefecture on Japan's mainland of Honshu. The dialect is famous for being notoriously difficult for outsiders to understand.
The goal is to make a website rich with information regarding Tsugaru-ben. A general overview of the dialect along with a more deeper look at the grammar
Anybody who has an interest in the Tsugaru dialect, or even Japanese in general. Outside of Standard Japanese, Kansai-ben is the most widely spoken dialect. However, Tsugaru-ben is well known throughout Japan because of how different it can be from Standard Japanese and its continued use in Northern Japan. Because of this, I think it is good for any learner who lives or will live in Japan to know a little bit about it. Of course if you are moving to the Tsugaru region, you definitely should try to at least familiarize yourself with some words.
I also hope researchers may find it useful as well. Computer resources for the dialect are sparse, especially in English. I hope this website can help alleviate the gap.
My name is Vance. I moved to Japan in 2018 to pursue my master's degree at Hirosaki University. I have since graduated and continue to live and work in Hirosaki.
While my background is in IT, I am also interested in literature and lingustics. As a master's student at Hirosaki University, I worked on developing a corpus for the Tsugaru dialect.
I began to learn the Japanese language after I moved to the Tsugaru region, so there is a strong influence from the dialect on my way of speaking and vocabulary. This is one of the primary reasons I became interested in the dialect.
Feel free to contact me if you wish at vance {a} tsugaruben.net.