About a year ago, my Japanese teacher (she’s a Tokyo native) was telling us a story about how when she visited her friends in a different city (I think it was Osaka?), the grammar structure there was different. She said that in the standard Japanese she was teaching, words that end in (えい) like きれい get the な particle, and words that end (い) like かわいい don’t (unless it’s 小さい or 大きい on occasion). But that her friends would use な adjectives in the same format as い adjectives. Is this common or more of an informal thing? Or does the grammar change depending on what part of Japan you’re in (ex. Sapporo vs. Fukuoka)?
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4 comments
Do they drop the い? I see that form occasionally, like 小さな and 大きな, but I’m not really sure when/why it’s used, or whether it’s a productive rule that any い adjective can be な-ified.
While there is plenty of dialectal variation to be found in Japanese, I can’t think of a case where it would involve using い adjectives as な adjectives. Not sure if I’m understanding what you’ve asked correctly.
The big grammar difference between textbook Japanese and Osaka (or other parts of Kansai) is verb conjugation for polite forms. I’m not aware of treating adjectives the way you describe, and I lived in that area for three years
I’ve run into cases of _-na_ adjective 綺麗 (_kirei_, “pretty; clean”) being used as an _-i_ adjective — but that has only been 1) by learners of Japanese who didn’t know better, and 2) by kids / young adults deliberately messing with the language as a kind of slang.
The trends for #2 change rapidly. If the instances you can recall are all _-na_ adjectives that happen to end in an “i” sound, it might have been this kind of slang word-play — in which case, this is not _”[different] grammar rules in different regions”_, and instead just a flash-in-the-pan slang phenomenon, specific to a certain age range and time period.
For an English analog, think about the _”totally tubular!”_, _”radical!”_, and _”gag me with a spoon”_ expressions in US English, and how these are tied to the 1980s.