A geolinguistic survey was conducted at 300 locations in the Kyushu region of Japan to measure acceptance of the term tengoku. From the survey results a linguistic map of the usage of tengoku was constructed and used to analyze the influence of differences in religion, region, interlocutors and situation. The following things were revealed. 1. Catholics and adherents of Shinto tend to accept tengoku more than the believers of other religions. 2. Adherents of the Jodo-shin-shu sects of Buddhism tend to accept tengoku less than the believers of other religions. The reason for this is that they have original Buddhist terms, such as Jodo, with meanings equivalent to 'paradise' or 'heaven'. 3. Tengoku is more accepted in Miyazaki and Kagoshima prefectures, on the other hand, less accepted in Nagasaki prefecture. 4. Tengoku tends to be used when people speak to children, but not when speaking in a Buddhist temple.

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In order to discern the actual conditions of Tokyo Northeastern accent, which has been noted to share continuity with the so-called "Saitama distinctive accent", an analysis was carried out based on an interview survey in which 87 residents born and raised in the area read from a word list. After analyzing the accent of the region from three different aspects: accent pattern, age difference, and regional difference, it became clear that although the entirety of Tokyo's northeast region is standardizing and transitioning to the Tokyo central regional accent, characteristics of the Saitama distinctive accent such as "formal variation" and "end-high forms in groups IV and V" still persist. These trends are particularly noticeable in the elderly. From the above results, the following two points became clear: 1. The process of transitioning from an accent vaguely reminiscent of the Saitama distinctive accent to one that is clearly that of the Tokyo central region can be explained as a process of erasing "same word variation" and "formal variation." 2. The discontinuous nature of the accent's geographical distribution can be explained by urbanization due to the establishment of the railroad network.

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