I guess it partially depends on the details of how Hiko had raised him, and especially the way Kenshin was speaking at the time-- when he refused of Katsura's invitation to a more political role, he was brusque enough to astonish Iizuka and the other guy who was with them (the one who was killed by the Yaminobu later for eavesdropping on Iizuka's report).
Somewhere in Clara's diary, she reports meeting a very high-ranking nobleman in the direct family of a great daimyou or possibly even the main Tokugawa branch, and that although the noble was very nice to them, Clara could barely understand what he was saying (in the very formal keigo of the Imperial court, I suppose; she only describes it as containing a lot of words from Chinese) despite her already being reasonably fluent in the mid-level speech patterns around her (probably samurai-class; a lot of the Japanese people in their social circle had visited the US and in some cases had even attended college there). Similarly, the bio about Akihito and Michiko mentioned that when the Showa Emperor made his formal radio announcement of the surrender to the Allies, most citizens could barely comprehend the message-- aside from the general unthinkability of defeat and the very indirect wording of the statement ("we have come to an agreement with the Allies" or suchlike), he'd been raised from birth to speak in keigo.
OTOH, one thing that doesn't come across in RK about Tomoe is that an average girl from Edo would've been very obviously unrefined by Kyoto standards of speech and cuisine-- "judging from the way she cooks, she isn't from around here" is not a neutral comment in this context-- but dressed in a more fashion-conscious way. Conversely, if Kenshin's speech was fitting fairly well into refined Kyoto diction, she might've been initially fooled by that into thinking that he had a higher birth-rank than he really did, unless there were some specific undercurrents going on in their conversation at the inn about all the books in his room, and his lack of interest in them.
He does tell her later on that his father had been a farmer, but at a certain level of analysis, the whole thing boils down to not just the uncertainty about what form their "wedding" really would've taken, considering Kenshin's lack of a family registry, but also the sheer unlikelihood at the time of *any* wife adopting her husband's family name, unless she'd been brought into the husband's household from an early age and adopted as a foster-daughter.
And then there's Watsuki's consistent blooper about Kenshin's speech patterns-- afaik he never uses the correct forms of adjectives that ought to go with "gozaru"; the common morning greeting "ohayou!" is clipped down from the stock phrase "o-hayou gozaimasu", of which the equivalent in normal speech would be something like "hayai da"-- and at some point you just have to deal with RK being historical fiction rather than historical fact.
Re: KenshinxTomoe
Somewhere in Clara's diary, she reports meeting a very high-ranking nobleman in the direct family of a great daimyou or possibly even the main Tokugawa branch, and that although the noble was very nice to them, Clara could barely understand what he was saying (in the very formal keigo of the Imperial court, I suppose; she only describes it as containing a lot of words from Chinese) despite her already being reasonably fluent in the mid-level speech patterns around her (probably samurai-class; a lot of the Japanese people in their social circle had visited the US and in some cases had even attended college there). Similarly, the bio about Akihito and Michiko mentioned that when the Showa Emperor made his formal radio announcement of the surrender to the Allies, most citizens could barely comprehend the message-- aside from the general unthinkability of defeat and the very indirect wording of the statement ("we have come to an agreement with the Allies" or suchlike), he'd been raised from birth to speak in keigo.
OTOH, one thing that doesn't come across in RK about Tomoe is that an average girl from Edo would've been very obviously unrefined by Kyoto standards of speech and cuisine-- "judging from the way she cooks, she isn't from around here" is not a neutral comment in this context-- but dressed in a more fashion-conscious way. Conversely, if Kenshin's speech was fitting fairly well into refined Kyoto diction, she might've been initially fooled by that into thinking that he had a higher birth-rank than he really did, unless there were some specific undercurrents going on in their conversation at the inn about all the books in his room, and his lack of interest in them.
He does tell her later on that his father had been a farmer, but at a certain level of analysis, the whole thing boils down to not just the uncertainty about what form their "wedding" really would've taken, considering Kenshin's lack of a family registry, but also the sheer unlikelihood at the time of *any* wife adopting her husband's family name, unless she'd been brought into the husband's household from an early age and adopted as a foster-daughter.
And then there's Watsuki's consistent blooper about Kenshin's speech patterns-- afaik he never uses the correct forms of adjectives that ought to go with "gozaru"; the common morning greeting "ohayou!" is clipped down from the stock phrase "o-hayou gozaimasu", of which the equivalent in normal speech would be something like "hayai da"-- and at some point you just have to deal with RK being historical fiction rather than historical fact.