Saturday, September 2, 2017

set phrases - Contraction of particle の to ん before nouns in colloquial Japanese


I am familiar with contraction of の to ん before です (and variants で, だ, でした etc) but I noticed that の is also contracted before 家 in spoken set-phrases like あたしんち and おれんち.


Are there any other instances where の is contracted before some particular nouns? I remember hearing おれんとこ in some anime/jdrama but I might have misheard.


Also, are there any dialects that utilize these types of contractions more frequently than the other colloquial dialects?



Answer



Chakoshi to the rescue! (Chakoshi is a tool for searching both the Aozora and conversational Japanese corpora at Nagoya University.)


A quick search for a "[noun]ん[noun]" pattern in the conversational corpus gives 262 results, most of which are what you are asking about. Broken down, there's actually not much variety in the nouns that follow ん:



とき (99): 高校とき, 研修とき, 外出とき, …


とこ(ろ) (78): そことこ, こっちとこ, 今とこ, ほかとこ, …



中 (62): 頭中, 山中, 電車中, …


ち (11): おれち, おまえち, 人ち, …



This contraction is present in both masculine and feminine speech. I can't think of any other phrases offhand that use ん this way, but I can't say that means they're not out there. If you can think of some, please put in a comment.


As far as dialectical variation goes, the Chakoshi corpus covers a fairly wide range of speakers, but I would have to do a deeper analysis on the results to find out if there are any trends.


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