I'm a beginner and am learning from CD (Pimsleur). There are two native speakers going through the dialogue. One, the man, pronounces が as I would expect - 'ga'. The other (female) pronounces it as 'nga'.
How common is the latter? Which should I used? Is the usage split along gender, age or geographic lines?
"Ga" and "Nga" are same in Japanese, just a personal difference. Some used to say that old Japanese people used "Nga" more frequently than "Ga"
nga is nothing more than が ga in the Edo dialect. It was adopted as the correct pronunciation during the Meiji period and it still is the preferred form if you want to work for the NHK.
– user145
Jun 1 '11 at 14:31
nga can be found only when が is between vowels (i.e. in the middle of the word and not after a っ or an ん).
– Boaz Yaniv
Jun 1 '11 at 22:17
Here's the English equivalents for the IPA:
[ɡ] = the 'g' in 'get'
[ŋ] = the 'ng' in 'sing'
The main difference is that [ŋ] is a nasal consonant, whereas [ɡ] is not. If you try plugging your nose and pronouncing [ŋ], you'll realize that it's not possible. That's because air must flow through the nasal passage, but not the oral passage, for [ŋ]. The simplest answer to your question is that [ŋ] can optionally replace [ɡ] only in the middle of the word or compound (An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Tsujimura, 2013), so for example:
Words and phrases cannot start with a [ŋ]. Since [ɡ]→[ŋ] is optional, speakers are divided into 3 obvious categories:
A study in 1941 showed that each category was equally about 30% out of 70 middle-school students (Nihongo no Hensen. Kindaichi, 1967).
Generally older speakers use [ŋ] more and younger speakers less. In fact, here is a graph of that relationship:
This graph comes from the paper Variationist Sociolinguistics in The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (download here). Also, here is a map of the distribution:
It's a high-res map so to actually see it, you can download the original here. But basically the pink is [ɡ] and the green is [ŋ]. This map comes from a survey done by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics and you can find more maps like it here. Generally [ŋ] is more prestigious than [ɡ] and a little bit of history explains why:
- Before World War II, it was an emphasized point of elementary school education that /g/ should be realized as [ŋ] in non-initial position. Today, many trained television and radio broadcasters use non-initial [ŋ].
- In early nineteenth-century literature (Ukiyoburo written by Shikitei Samba), it is specifically mentioned that speakers in Edo had the nasal word-internally [ŋ] while rural speakers had the plosive [g]
- The results of these analyses, along with the earlier findings and observations, show that the change of word-internal [g] to [ŋ] in Tokyo Japanese originated in yamanote in the early twentieth century and has spread to the entire Tokyo speech community.
Also, there is no significant difference in usage by gender. As for the future trend:
An overall increase in the use of word-internal [g] in the vernacular is observed over several decades. The change is near completion, and the word-internal [ŋ] has been replaced by [g] at a very rapid rate within three generations.
So, [ŋ] is moribund (becoming extinct) at least in the areas major of Japan. As a JSL student you'd prolly be better off just forgetting it even exists. Besides all that, there's a bunch of interesting details and exceptions regarding the [ɡ]/[ŋ] alternation, but that's prolly best left to a separate question on its own.
A late answer, but I thought I'd throw it in anyway. As the others have said, they are allophones and mostly interchangeable. When I moved to Tokyo, I immediately noticed this sound. The strange thing was that getting other Japanese people to hear the difference was very difficult and it took some effort to find out what was going on. Apparently most are oblivious to the difference.
One thing I found very interesting was that the two pronunciations are (very) occasionally distinguished using a handakuten. i.e. nga = か゜. See for example this article.
I mostly agree with YOU in that it is personal preference and perhaps more of a broad preference that may be more prevalent in different parts of Japan. I've also noticed that the "nga" pronunciation seems more common when が is spoken in places such as ですが where it often sounds something like desu-nga. In terms of a slightly more formal reference the English Wiktionary describes the Japanese particle が is given the IPA of /ɡa/ which only confirms that although nga may appear in actual usage, "ga" is probably the more proper pronunciation.
As a side note, it's interesting to see that there also seems to be a form of the が particle pronunciation popular in Okinawa that is referred to as ぎゃ at least by Wikictionary which I had never heard of prior to looking it up. The IPA pronunciation is listed as /ɡja/ and since I'm not a linguist I'm not able to confirm what this actually sounds like. Perhaps somebody with IPA background could confirm whether that comes out to be anything close to "nga" and if so maybe it explains a little bit of the variance in pronunciation of this particle.
/nja/ would sound like English "nya" or "nyah".
– hippietrail
Feb 25 '14 at 16:42
Ga and Nga are different, just like pronouncing を as "O" or "Wo". Saying Ga or O in this case is perfectly acceptable. However, the more correct pronunciation is Nga and Wo.
"nga" pronunciation seems more common when が is spoken in places such as ですが where it often sounds something like desu-nga
I have suspicion that Ga and Nga used to be two different characters and have become one written character over the years. But don't quote me on that.
I'm a native Japanese speaker, and I definitely can't tell the difference between g and ng. I grew up in the Kanto region, and I'm not sure if I use the g and the ng interchangeably or not. I might know how to pronounce the ng, I'm not sure.
But anyway, how you make a sound in Japanese isn't as important as using the correct intonation, which might be difficult for non-native speakers. A native Japanese speaker focuses more on the intonation, which might be why the native speakers find trouble discerning between each different sounds. Depending on the intonation, the word kumo could be interpreted as either a spider, or a cloud. Again, this depends on the dialect... So kumo spoken in a Kansai dialect could be said to mean a spider, but to a Tokyo dialect speaker it could be taken to mean a cloud.
Most native Japanese speakers can't tell the difference between z/s and th, l and r, n and ng, s and sh (except for す).
