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共通語 is ninety years old
The Japanese this course taught you is a deliberate construction. Until the Meiji period there was no spoken language shared across the country; officials from different domains wrote to each other in Chinese because they could not reliably talk. 標準語 was assembled from educated Tokyo speech, written into textbooks in the 1900s, and pushed hard — children in Okinawa and Tohoku were made to wear a 方言札, a dialect placard, as punishment for speaking their own language at school, a practice that lasted into living memory. Radio from 1925 and television from 1953 finished the job. Kansai is the one region that never gave way: it had its own prestige, its own commerce and its own comedy industry, and an Osaka executive will negotiate in 関西弁 without apology. Everywhere else, dialect retreated to the home and the grandparents.