Is There an L in Japanese?
The English letters R and L have an interesting relationship to the Japanese language. This has resulted in a lot of misconceptions. Many people say that Japanese has no “L” sound, but that simply isn’t true. In fact, it can be just as true to say that Japanese has no “R” sound.
How can that be?
Let’s take a deeper look into what people mean when they say the “L” or “R” sound without getting too into the weeds of complicated linguistics. Afterwards, we can explore what sound the Japanese language actuallyuses. Then we can end with understanding why it is kind of just easier to say Japan does have R’s and doesn’t have L’s, even if that statement is not completely accurate.
R and L in English
To keep things simple and avoid going into the very fine details of phonetics, let’s start by simply stating that English speakers (specifically Americans) and Japanese speakers use a different mouth/tongue placement when pronouncing the sounds for R and L.
To visualize this, think of where your tongue is when you say “la”. It should start on the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth. This part of your mouth is technically referred to as alveolar ridge and it is right between your hard palate and upper teeth.
Now, try the “ra” sound. You should notice that with a typical American accent, your tongue doesn’t really move much and just rests at the bottom of your mouth while your lips do the majority of the work.
Keep these two sounds and tongue positions in mind as we move on to look at pronouncing “r” in the Japanese language.
R and L in Japanese
“R can be found in these five kana: ra, ri, ru, re, and, ro. We purposefully looked at “ra”/ “la” in English, so we could relate their sound and tongue position to the kana, ra.
When written using the English alphabet, the kana are typically written using r’s; and this in part contributes to the misconception that Japanese has “r”, but not “l” sounds.
You may have heard before that the Japanese “r” is a combination of the English “r” and “l”. There is some truth to that idea, but it’s a little over simplistic. Also, it doesn’t really explain how you should actually pronounce the “r” / “l” sound in Japanese.
How to Pronounce “R” in Japanese
To pronounce ra in Japanese, start by putting your tongue in position to say “la” instead. This is close to where you want it, but not quite perfect. Regardless, if you try saying the sound “ra” in the tongue position of “la” a couple times you’ll get a pretty close Japanese ra sound.
To help perfect this sound, now try saying “da” in English. Notice how your tongue also comes up to the roof of your mouth, but it’s farther back than “la”.
For the Japanese ra, you want to try to place your tongue somewhere in between the English “da” and “la” position and then say “ra”.
This works exactly the same for all the kana: ra, ri, ru, re, and ro.
Japanese Speakers Can’t Hear the Difference Between R and L
Looking at the pronunciation of “r” in Japan, you can see why you really can’t say that Japanese doesn’t have an “L” sound, but instead has an “R” sound, as the two are intertwined. This also leads to an interesting development where Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language have a hard time pronouncing and distinguishing “r” from “l”.
There have been numerous studies on this subject which have produced very interesting results. One study in 1975 found that Japanese speakers could distinguish English “r” and “l” sounds just as well as English speakers if they manipulated the sounds to make them less speech like. This way, their brain thought of the sounds differently and didn’t try to process them as speech.
Other studies have shown that very young children could hear the difference between “r” and “l”, but eventually they lose the ability if they never learn English.
This side effect helps to show that in Japanese “r” and “l” really are the same phenome or sound.
Another interesting test to get more tangible proof of this concept is when Japanese speakers say a word with “r’s” such as “robotto”. If they say the word over and over, starting fast and slowing down over time, the “r” sound will shift to an “l” sound. If you point this out to them, they won’t notice at all because it’s the same phenome to them. The only tangible difference is how long their pronouncing that “r/l” sound. To English speakers though, this changes the way they hear the sound.
Here’s a real world example you can see from a video with Japanese YouTubers, Rachel and Jun.
Hybrid “R/L” Sound
In the end what we can take away from all of this is that Japanese has its own “r/l” hybrid, which is simply different from how native English speakers pronounce either sound. Saying all that isn’t easy when someone asks about it though and that is why it’s probably easier to just say that Japanese doesn’t have the letter “l” at all.
