Ibaraki and Tohoku

One day last Summer, my Kansai-raised wife, 11-year-old son and I bicycled past a road crew in Tsukuba. My wife could not understand their conversation; my son did. Why? The crew was speaking Tohoku dialect, which my son heard spoken daily by classmates and teachers, but which my wife and I did not normally encounter.

While Ibaraki Prefecture is administratively part of Kanto, most of it is linguistically and culturally part of Tohoku. For a linguistic comparison of Ibaraki and its surroundings, see http://www1.tmtv.ne.jp/~kadoya-sogo/ibaraki15-map.html.