Hokkaido-Ben: Useful Words from the Hokkaido Dialect to Spice Up Your Trip
https://livejapan.com/en/in-hokkaido/in ... -a1000402/
Will the old Japan languages die out?
"Use them or lose them: There's more at stake than language in reviving Ryukyuan tongues"
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/ ... n-tongues/
the older Ainu language is said to be critically endangered
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/ain
in February 2019, Japan approved a bill to recognize the Ainu language for the first time
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/ ... irst-time/
方言とは何ですか?
方言ってなんだろう?
Altaic languages theory? Some say dialects have island origins, old local Japan regions with links to Korea, an Altaic family language which spans the Asiatic continent with Mongolian, Chinese, Malayo-Polynesian, even Indian Sanskrit influence? Other theories about the origin of Japanese are that it is related to the Aussie Pacific island Austronesian languages putting it in the Hawaiian Javanese family, the Hindu Indian Tamil Dravidian languages
Wikipedia cant seem to agree on anything
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Altaic_languages
Some Western and French and English based linguists have tried to class it as an Agglutinative language, next to Native American languages, old islamic Berber languages, the Somali speak, the Basque language, Georgian South Russian dialect and African Tribal languages. Others claim it is Turkish, Iranian or Tatar based however just because they seem to share words or there are similarities between words, or the fact some might share grammatical features with each other does not mean these languages are the same. Old Asian farmers (Yayoi People) from the Korean Peninsula probably mixed with Japanese, numbers and cultures in Japan overwhelmed, and perhaps mixed with the native hunter-gatherer population (Jomon People) so it is possible these people shared some ethnic and language root from long ago, archaeologists have found old writings, pots and old extinct Japan-ish words and placenames from southern Korea appearing in ancient Chinese and Japonic-Korean texts.
We still have Kyushu-ben, Osaka/Kyoto Dialect, Hachijo island dialect is often classed as additional branch, the Okinawa language the southern islands are said form a separate branch of the Japonic family and not classed as dialect, there was a centralization and Unify time for Japan in the Edo period and there was a time when one local village would need a translator for another town, Japan's languages were very regionalized local ways of talking and some people who spoke one dialect of Japanese totally could not understand what another person in another part of Japan spoke because the local dialects were so different to each other. After world war 2 again there was more standardized of Japanese but most websites don't cover the history, most interweb studies I have seen on the origin of Japanese do not go beyond simple speculation
Linguistic Atlas
https://www.ninjal.ac.jp/publication/catalogue/laj_map/