Reduplicated Plurals (人々, 山々)

There is one more way Japanese can signal plurality or collectivity, and it is visually striking: reduplication. A handful of nouns double their root and are written with the iteration mark 々, giving forms like 人々（ひとびと）hitobito "people" and 山々（やまやま）yamayama "mountains." Two things make this pattern worth a page. First, the doubled reading usually undergoes rendaku (sequential voicing), so the second half changes sound: 人 hito + 人 → hito-bito. Second — and this is the trap — the pattern is lexicalized, not productive: you cannot reduplicate an arbitrary noun to pluralize it. There is a closed list of these words, and you learn them one by one.

The iteration mark 々

The character 々 is not a kanji and has no reading of its own. It is a repetition symbol (called 踊り字 odoriji, or informally ノマ noma from its shape) that means "repeat the previous kanji." So 人々 is read exactly as if it were written 人人 — hitobito — and 時々 is 時時 tokidoki. Writers use 々 instead of doubling the kanji because it is faster and cleaner to read. The mark and its cousins (ゝ for kana, 〃 for "ditto") are covered on Iteration Marks.

The core reduplicated collectives

These are the reduplicated nouns you will actually meet. Notice how often the second element voices:

Semantically, reduplication conveys "the many individual X taken together" — not just "more than one" but a sense of variety or a whole set: 人々 is people in their multitude, 山々 is a whole range of peaks, 星々 is a sky full of stars.

The rendaku is the same rule you meet in compounds

The voicing in these forms is not a special "plural rule." It is ordinary rendaku (連濁, "sequential voicing"), the same process that turns 手 te + 紙 kami into 手紙 tegami. When a native element begins the second half of a compound, its initial consonant tends to voice: k→g, s→z, t→d, h→b. Reduplication is just a compound of a word with itself, so it triggers the same shift. That is why 人 → bito, 時 → doki, 神 → gami. The full conditioning (including why it sometimes doesn't happen) is on Rendaku: Sequential Voicing.

But rendaku has limits, and reduplication respects them. The consonants y, w, m, n, r have no voiced counterpart in this system, so words beginning with them don't voice: 山々 stays yamayama, 我々 stays wareware, 村（むら）々 stays muramura. So 々 reliably repeats the kanji, and often — but not always — voices the second copy.

Some reduplications have drifted from "plural"

Several of these words are no longer felt as plurals at all. 時々 has become the everyday adverb "sometimes," and 我々 is a formal/literary pronoun meaning "we." 様々 works as a な-adjective meaning "various." 日々 leans literary and can mean "day after day" or "daily life."

Register note: 我々 is decidedly formal/literary (speeches, editorials, a leader addressing a group) — in casual speech you say 私たち. 人々, 時々, and 様々 are neutral and thoroughly everyday.

An orthographic caveat: 々 stays inside one word

Because 々 simply means "repeat the previous kanji," it is tempting to use it any time the same kanji appears twice in a row — but careful writing restricts it to repetition within a single word. When two identical kanji meet across a compound boundary, standard practice is to write both out in full rather than use 々. So 民主主義（みんしゅしゅぎ）"democracy" (民主 "democratic" + 主義 "-ism") is written with two 主, not 民主々義, because the repeated 主 belongs to two different words that happen to abut. Likewise 会社（かいしゃ）+ 社長（しゃちょう）→ 会社社長 "company president," not 会社々長. Reduplicated collectives like 人々, on the other hand, are single words, so 々 is exactly right for them.

Not productive — you cannot invent new ones

This is the crucial restriction. Reduplication is a closed, lexicalized set. You may not take an arbitrary noun and double it to make a plural: 本々 for "books" and 猫々 for "cats" are not words. When you want a plain plural, use the tools from the other pages — leave the noun bare, add a counter, or (for people) use 〜たち, covered on Plural-ish Suffixes. Reduplication is something to recognize and use in its fixed forms, not a pattern to extend.

Common mistakes

Reduplication is not a productive plural. Reach for a counter or a quantifier instead of doubling a random noun.

Reading 々 without applying rendaku is the most common pronunciation slip: it's hitobito, tokidoki, kigi — not hitohito, tokitoki, kiki.

The flip side of the first mistake: don't over-apply rendaku. Words starting with y/w/m/n/r stay unvoiced — yamayama, wareware, muramura.

Since a reduplicated form is already collective, don't pile a second plural marker on top of it.

Key takeaways

• A small closed set of nouns forms a collective by reduplication, written with the iteration mark 々 (人々, 山々, 時々, 我々, 日々, 神々, 国々, 星々).
• The doubled second element usually rendaku-voices (hito→bito, toki→doki, kami→gami) — the same sequential voicing seen in ordinary compounds — but stays flat after y/w/m/n/r (yamayama, wareware).
• 々 means "repeat the previous kanji"; it has no sound of its own.
• The pattern is not productive — you can't reduplicate arbitrary nouns; use bare forms, counters, or 〜たち for ordinary plurals.