You made a typo in your Google Books Ngram Viewer query.

You typed ud instead of us.

I'd turn smoothing to 0

Or, my favorite, maximum:

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Unfortunately, the results have too much noise to really tell us anything useful, I think.

Take a look at the COCA results. Click through for mafia are.

You'll notice most of those instances the plural isn't actually agreeing with mafia.

The words just happen to be adjacent.

So the preference for the singular in AmE appears to be quite strong.

BrE too, judging by BNC.

It is.

It's better than the Mafia were, really.

See you!

As an aside, I recommend against setting the end of the window to 2008.

@DamkerngT. It doesn't look like that answer rules it out based on was versus were.

Although to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what that answer does say

Oh! In Japanese, the news is far from easiest :-)

@hellodear2 My favorite singer in English is probably Fiona Apple.

I wonder if these videos are available outside the US...?

Yay

I'll try posting one more for hellodear2

@hellodear2 To form a question, you need to do subject-auxiliary inversion. And to do that, your question needs an auxiliary verb. Since you don't have one, you insert do: "It has how many chapters?" → "It does have how many chapters?" Then you front the interrogative phrase how many chapters: "how many chapters it does have" Then you invert the subject and auxiliary: "How many chapters does it have?"

Your example has how many chapters fronted, but it doesn't have subject-auxiliary inversion, so it's not a proper main clause interrogative.

@DamkerngT. They do enunciate fairly well. The tricky thing is, they use lots of vocabulary! :-)

Actually, they're usually made to stick to a particular accent deemed standard. The NHK even has an official pronunciation dictionary they expect their announcers to use

I have that dictionary. It writes pronunciation in katakana, but:

1. A mora whose vowel is devoiced is indicated with a dotted-line circle

2. A horizontal line over the top of a word shows the accented portion, if any

(A small downward line shows the location of a phonemic pitch drop, if any)

3. A mora containing /g/ which can be realized as a "nasal g" [ŋ] is written with a ゜ mark

Japanese has two allophones of /g/, which unfortunately is not something that is taught to most learners

Newspeople generally use the nasal G wherever it's possible to do so.

(It's a prestige pronunciation. It's slowly dying out in Japan as a whole, but you still hear it in real life sometimes in some areas, and to a greater extent on TV and radio because actors are trained to produce it)

Remember, / / is typically used for phonemic transcriptions.

I can't tell what you mean when you write /ng/ or /g+k/

However, [ŋ] is often referred to as <ng>

I recommend not writing those between slashes

It's not possible to interpret phonemic transcriptions unless you know (at a minimum) which language they're written for

The angle brackets are to indicate characters (graphemes), as in spelling

You can also just write ng or "ng", without any special symbols, if you like

You could say that [ŋ] is commonly referred to as ng because in English we use those letters to write it in words like walking

But there's usually no phonemic /g/ involved

(In English)

In Japanese, [ŋ] is a possible realization of both /N/ (the moraic nasal) and /g/ (the voiced velar consonant)

So for example, if you pronounce sugoi /sugoi/ as [sɯŋoi], using the nasal G pronunciation

And you lengthen that sound for emphasis, you get sungoi /suNgoi/ [sɯŋːoi]

Yeah, it's a pretty versatile word. *That's amazing! / great! / incredible!" might be the basic meaning on its own

It can be used as an intensifier

It's the most common adjective heard on television.

(Often in adverbial form, sugoku.)

In Japanese, there is more than one possible pronunciation

The nasal G I've pointed out is optional: [sɯgoi] is possible

That typically has a long final vowel.

Subarashii! "That's splendid / wonderful!"

It's occasionally cut short.

Japanese [oi] and [ai] and [ae] are all commonly slurred to [eː]

So you might hear for example [sɯgeː]

Yeah, there are three ways to lengthen it:

1. Lengthen the /u/. 2. Lengthen the /g/. 3. Lengthen the /o/

All of which serve to emphasize it

And it's a very commonly emphasized word.

Colloquially, adjectives are also clipped sometimes, removing the /i/: /sugoQ/ [sɯgoʔ]

In this case I used /Q/ to indicate a phoneme realized as a glottal stop. It's debatable whether it's actually a phoneme.

In most cases inside a word, /Q/ (if it exists) is not realized with a glottal stop

I should probably just wrote /sugo/ [sɯgoʔ], to be honest

In Japanese, the glottal stop appears only in utterance-initial and final positions

Inside words, this /Q/ is realized instead as gemination

I'm not entirely sure whether /Q/ is a useful abstraction

In Japanese orthography, there is a character called "small tsu" which looks like っ or ッ

/Q/ corresponds to it. It's used at the beginning or end of utterances to indicate glottal consonants

つづく, perhaps?

"To be continued"

That uses the large つ. Not the small っ.

つづく tsuzuku /tuduku/ [tsɯd͡zɯkɯ]

Ahh, typing IPA is hard work. :-)

Inside words, it indications gemination: ろっぱつ roppatsu

ろ　っ　ぱ　つ　　ro p pa tsu

See, the little っ corresponds to a gemination of the following consonant /p/.

(Gemination from "Gemini", meaning a doubling)

っ corresponds to the following sound

roku + hatsu ろく + はつ　　=　　 rop + patsu ろっ + ぱつ

The /u/ disappears: rok + hatsu, and the /kh/ assimilates to /hh/, which becomes /pp/

I should use a better example, perhaps

Nihon "Japan"

If you double the /h/: *Nihhon, the /hh/ becomes /pp/: Nippon

And in kana, that's Nihon にほん and Nippon にっぽん

Nihon and Nippon are both possible pronunciations of 日本 "Japan"

However, Nihon is the more everyday pronunciation, and Nippongo is not commonly heard

Unfortunately, that っ in the middle of a word is often incorrectly described as a glottal stop