Do speakers that distinguish all four yotsugana in speech preserve the non-rendaku ぢ and づ in writing?


According to Wikipedia (and some posters here), Kagoshima Japanese resists the
じ・ぢ and ず・づ mergers, much in the same way that various English dialects retain
differences between words like _meet_ and _meat_ : [![Yotsugana by dialect
map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Gk0Q.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Gk0Q.png)
But the gendai kanadzukai (or rather _kanazukai_ ) has flattened out the
orthographical distinctions between these kana. Is this just a "sucks to speak
a nonstandard dialect!" sort of situation? I believe I remember reading in a
different Wikipedia article (although I can't find it now) that said that ぢ
and づ were "not completely obsolete" because of the Kagoshima dialect. Do
Kagoshima speakers, when writing in their own vernacular, still use the ぢ- and
づ-based spellings of words that they pronounce differently?

Also... what's that little speck of purple on the edge of Yamanashi?




Many moons ago, I taught English to first-year college students at a school in
Tochigi Prefecture. One student had come up from somewhere in Kyūshū, although
I forget exactly where. His name was 小島【こじま】. I called him こじまさん using the
generally-Kantō pronunciation of じ, starting with a consonant something like
[[dʑ]] (not too far from an English ⟨j⟩, with more of a stop sound initially),
and he was insistent that the consonant in じ was pronounced more like [[ʑ]] or
[[ʒ]] without the initial stop (technically, the [voiced alveolo-palatal
fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolo-palatal_fricative),
which doesn't exist in most varieties of English; or the [voiced post-alveolar
fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative), as in
the pronunciation of the letter ⟨s⟩ in the words _leisure_ or _collision_ ).
He wrote his name in kana on the blackboard (since we were already standing
there) and emphasized that it's spelled with a じ.

While not conclusive, I think this is strongly suggestive that, for this one
person at least, the spellings and pronunciations are both distinct for those
who distinguish the 四つ仮名 pronunciations in speech.

