Japanese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "夜" in Japanese?

Q: How do you pronounce 夜 in Japanese?

夜 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /jo.ɾɯ/. It means “night.” yo-ru, two short beats — a fixed o, one tap, and completely flat lips on the u.

yo-ru, two short beats — a fixed o, one tap, and completely flat lips on the u.

夜 /jo.ɾɯ/

yoru

Two slots of equal size, and standard speech leaves the word unaccented — so the pitch rises from yo to ru and stays up, keeping a following particle high. Neither beat is the word's centre of gravity.

Listen: 夜

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Sound it out

yo The y-glide and the o form a single mora together. The vowel stays in one position rather than drifting toward w as English "yo" does.

ru One quick contact of the tongue tip with the ridge, then the unrounded u. Rounding that vowel is the most audible error available in a word this short.

Hear it in a sentence

夜は町がとても静かです。

Yoru wa machi ga totemo shizuka desu.

At night the town is very quiet.

Listen: 夜は町がとても静かです。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

夜は町がとても静かです has 町 (ma-chi) with a light affricate and 静か (shi-zu-ka) whose opening shi can devoice. So after two clearly-voiced beats in 夜, the sentence moves through an affricate and a whispered vowel — a good survey of textures at one steady tempo.

Where English speakers slip

"YO-roo" glides the o, stresses the first beat, curls the r and rounds the u. Freeze the vowel, tap the tongue once, and spread the lips. Because the word is only two morae, every one of those errors is proportionally large — a mispronounced よる is unrecognisable in a way a mispronounced five-mora word wouldn't be.