You can helpexpand this article with text translated fromthe corresponding article in Japanese. (February 2009)Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, likeDeepL orGoogle Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consideradding a topic to this template: there are already 1,562 articles in themain category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. Youmust providecopyright attribution in theedit summary accompanying your translation by providing aninterlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary isContent in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:四つ仮名]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template{{Translated|ja|四つ仮名}} to thetalk page. For more guidance, seeWikipedia:Translation.

This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Yotsugana" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Jōyō kanji list Kyōiku kanji Tōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji
Kana Hiragana Hentaigana Katakana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn Kunrei-shiki / ISO 3602 Nihon-shiki JSL Wāpuro (keyboard input)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

Yotsugana (四つ仮名, literally "four kana") are a set of four specifickana,じ,ぢ,ず,づ (in theNihon-shiki romanization system:zi,di,zu,du), used in theJapanese writing system. They historically represented four distinct voicedmorae (syllables) in the Japanese language. However, most dialects, such as Standard Japanese-speakers, have undergone mergers and now pronounce two sounds.

Most of the far northern dialects (Tōhoku dialects and Hokkaidō) and far southern dialects (notablyOkinawan Japanese) and theRyukyuan languages (the otherJaponic languages) have also mostly merged the four sounds to one sound. However, a few dialects, mainly aroundShikoku andKyushu in the southwest, still distinguish three or even all four sounds.

In the currentTokyo dialect, the base of the modern standard language, as well as in the widely spokenKansai dialect, only two sounds are distinguished, as is represented in theHepburn (ji,ji,zu,zu) andKunrei (zi,zi,zu,zu) romanization systems.

The spelling differences between the four kana were retained well into the mid-20th century, long after the merger of the different sounds that they had represented. Two distinct morae remain in most dialects of the mainland, such as in Tokyo.

Shortly after World War II ended, the discrepancy between kana orthography and pronunciation was rectified as part of a general orthographic reform, theGendai Kanazukai, or modern kana orthography. Under the neworthographic rules, only the two kanaじzi andずzu are to be used, with two notable exceptions:

1. When a word exhibits sequential voicing, orrendaku, as a result of compounding, a second morpheme that would otherwise begin with the kanaつtu orちti in isolation (神無月　かんなづきkannaduki for which月 in isolation is writtenつきtuki).
2. When the kanaつtu orちti is repeated and voiced in a word (続くつづくtuduku).

An exception was permitted for regions that pronounced the four kana as three or four distinct sounds. After a 1986 update to the Gendai Kanazukai, the exception was replaced with a statement that the unified spelling was to be primarily used, but etymologically-correct spellings would still be permitted.

The following table shows some of the differentiations amongyotsugana characters expressed in regional dialects across Japan:

• Japanese dialects
• Japanese phonology
• Kana
• Japanese orthography
• Japanese writing system

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles needing translation from Japanese Wikipedia
• Articles needing additional references from January 2014
• All articles needing additional references
• Articles containing Japanese-language text
• Pages with plain IPA