The joys of Kansai-ben
11 October 2005 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fencer_xSo. Japanese. A lot of people have probably heard of it, some may have even HEARD it. There are a good few people who speak it, but they're mostly stuck on some island, so I doubt many on my flist speak it.
As such, I feel it my place to point out to you poor ignorant fools the finer points of the language that just HAVE to be appreciated. Things like, in this installment, the Kansai dialect.
Kansai means nothing to most of you, I'm sure, so let me do a bit of background info. Kansai originates in a middleish section of Japan known as the Kinki region (mmm...kinky~). Cities you might be familiar with that are found in this region include Kyoto, Kobe and Osaka (the main prefectures). The actual 'Kansai region' most usually refers to the triangle region formed by Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. Why's the language different here, and just HOW different is it?
Why? Dunno. How different? VERY. To someone who doesn't know what they're listening or looking for, at least (which would be me~! Hardly understand any of the dialiect!). Take the following example, snatched from an excellent source HERE and romanized for your convenience:
English: "Give your mom that letter, okay?"
Normal dialect (the Tokyo dialect, for this purpose): "Okaasan ni sono tegami wo kashite, ne."
Kansai dialect (Osaka-ben, for this purpose--there are others in the region): "Okaahan ni sono tegami wo kashitari na."
In case you don't quite see what's so big a difference, another:
English: "Huh? The video's gone!"
Tokyo-ben: "Ara? Bideo ga nai nda!"
Osaka-ben: "Ara? Bideo ga arahen wa!"
You don't have to know a lick of Japanese to see that those two sentences are more than a little different. I won't bore you all with a huge, long list of all the differences (for that, you can go here and here, plus a lovely Wiki entry).
Then, what's so great about it? For one thing...well, I'll have to explain a bit.
If you don't watch anime, and even if you do but don't recognize the accent, you wouldn't know what's implied by the accent. I think of it as...kinda like our New York accent. Yanno, dat accent, eh? In anime and manga, all the characters with this accent--but one, really, that I'll talk about later--are presented as the comedians of the series. The funny guys, the tough guys, think Joey from Friends, but with more a gangster/bad-boy air. They're the ones who are confident and outspoken, rebels at times (many times they've dyed their hair blond), and almost always the source or butt of many jokes. Famous Kansai-benners you might know of include Kawachi Kyousuke from Yakitate! Japan, Saga Keiji from DNAngel, Haruki Emishi from Get Backers, Shigeki Sato from Whistle!, among others. The first one I really encountered and paid any attention to (for reasons I'll get to later) was Oshitari Yuushi from Prince of Tennis, whose seiyuu (voice actor), Kiuchi Hidenobu, funnily enough provides the voice of Shigeki Sato who I mentioned above, also. All of their voice actors (save poor Keiji, he's never been voiced!) are from the Kansai region.
Also, I must add that in anime, you almost never see female Kansai speakers. I've seen ONE. And she was in an episode of Whistle! for about five minutesZOMG IT WAS SO COOL THOUGH
So, now that I've got the image of a Kansai-speaker in your mind, I gotta say what really gets me. When I hear this accent, my opinion of what that character's role in the show is is pretty much set--he's gonna be the funny guy, the one who all the slapstick scenes revolve around, or at the very least the 'tough guy,' the rebel. Kawachi from Yakitate is an excellent exampleof the former, Shige from Whistle! an example of the latter. The one example I can think of who doesn't really cleanly fit into either category, is Oshitari Yuushi. Told you I'd come back to him.
What really fascinates me about the Kansai dilect is how...well, very feminine it sounds to me. There are "ya"s and "wa"s where in the Tokyo normal dialect one hears "da"s and harder consonants, "he"s and "ha"s where one would expect "se"s and "sa"s. Not to mention, "wa" as a sentence ending particle is usually used by women anyways, whereas it's seemingly unisexual in Kansai-ben. Kawachi refers to himself as "waiya" as opposed to "ore wa," a definite softening.
So we take this feminization of the language in this dialect, tack it on a very deep, lovely voice like Kiuchi Hidenobu's, and we have, ladies, some very, very sexy bit of seiyuu magic going on here. Oshitari, in the context of Prince of Tennis, is a Hyoutei regular, forming half of their Doubles 2 tennis team with hisukepartner, Mukahi Gakuto. He's from somewhere in the Kansai region (don't recall exactly where), and definitely has this accent, through and through.
If you're curious as to how it sounds, HERE is a megaupload link to a song from Oshitari's image album, called Mebachiko. Romanization of the Japanese as well as an English translation can be found HERE, and I really encourage people to give it a listen! You can really see the accent in action here, it's very thick, and even though I'm pretty confident in my Japanese skills, I can hardly understand ANY of this. So much awesomeness. If anyone's actually seen the Hyoutei Myu, I'd love to know if their Oshitari actually has the accent still!
So yeah, that's Kansai-ben in a nutshell. I'm obsessed with it now, gotta learn some of it XD Thanks for putting up with my horrible fangirling ♥
As such, I feel it my place to point out to you poor ignorant fools the finer points of the language that just HAVE to be appreciated. Things like, in this installment, the Kansai dialect.
Kansai means nothing to most of you, I'm sure, so let me do a bit of background info. Kansai originates in a middleish section of Japan known as the Kinki region (mmm...kinky~). Cities you might be familiar with that are found in this region include Kyoto, Kobe and Osaka (the main prefectures). The actual 'Kansai region' most usually refers to the triangle region formed by Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. Why's the language different here, and just HOW different is it?
Why? Dunno. How different? VERY. To someone who doesn't know what they're listening or looking for, at least (which would be me~! Hardly understand any of the dialiect!). Take the following example, snatched from an excellent source HERE and romanized for your convenience:
English: "Give your mom that letter, okay?"
Normal dialect (the Tokyo dialect, for this purpose): "Okaasan ni sono tegami wo kashite, ne."
Kansai dialect (Osaka-ben, for this purpose--there are others in the region): "Okaahan ni sono tegami wo kashitari na."
In case you don't quite see what's so big a difference, another:
English: "Huh? The video's gone!"
Tokyo-ben: "Ara? Bideo ga nai nda!"
Osaka-ben: "Ara? Bideo ga arahen wa!"
You don't have to know a lick of Japanese to see that those two sentences are more than a little different. I won't bore you all with a huge, long list of all the differences (for that, you can go here and here, plus a lovely Wiki entry).
Then, what's so great about it? For one thing...well, I'll have to explain a bit.
If you don't watch anime, and even if you do but don't recognize the accent, you wouldn't know what's implied by the accent. I think of it as...kinda like our New York accent. Yanno, dat accent, eh? In anime and manga, all the characters with this accent--but one, really, that I'll talk about later--are presented as the comedians of the series. The funny guys, the tough guys, think Joey from Friends, but with more a gangster/bad-boy air. They're the ones who are confident and outspoken, rebels at times (many times they've dyed their hair blond), and almost always the source or butt of many jokes. Famous Kansai-benners you might know of include Kawachi Kyousuke from Yakitate! Japan, Saga Keiji from DNAngel, Haruki Emishi from Get Backers, Shigeki Sato from Whistle!, among others. The first one I really encountered and paid any attention to (for reasons I'll get to later) was Oshitari Yuushi from Prince of Tennis, whose seiyuu (voice actor), Kiuchi Hidenobu, funnily enough provides the voice of Shigeki Sato who I mentioned above, also. All of their voice actors (save poor Keiji, he's never been voiced!) are from the Kansai region.
Also, I must add that in anime, you almost never see female Kansai speakers. I've seen ONE. And she was in an episode of Whistle! for about five minutes
So, now that I've got the image of a Kansai-speaker in your mind, I gotta say what really gets me. When I hear this accent, my opinion of what that character's role in the show is is pretty much set--he's gonna be the funny guy, the one who all the slapstick scenes revolve around, or at the very least the 'tough guy,' the rebel. Kawachi from Yakitate is an excellent exampleof the former, Shige from Whistle! an example of the latter. The one example I can think of who doesn't really cleanly fit into either category, is Oshitari Yuushi. Told you I'd come back to him.
What really fascinates me about the Kansai dilect is how...well, very feminine it sounds to me. There are "ya"s and "wa"s where in the Tokyo normal dialect one hears "da"s and harder consonants, "he"s and "ha"s where one would expect "se"s and "sa"s. Not to mention, "wa" as a sentence ending particle is usually used by women anyways, whereas it's seemingly unisexual in Kansai-ben. Kawachi refers to himself as "waiya" as opposed to "ore wa," a definite softening.
So we take this feminization of the language in this dialect, tack it on a very deep, lovely voice like Kiuchi Hidenobu's, and we have, ladies, some very, very sexy bit of seiyuu magic going on here. Oshitari, in the context of Prince of Tennis, is a Hyoutei regular, forming half of their Doubles 2 tennis team with his
If you're curious as to how it sounds, HERE is a megaupload link to a song from Oshitari's image album, called Mebachiko. Romanization of the Japanese as well as an English translation can be found HERE, and I really encourage people to give it a listen! You can really see the accent in action here, it's very thick, and even though I'm pretty confident in my Japanese skills, I can hardly understand ANY of this. So much awesomeness. If anyone's actually seen the Hyoutei Myu, I'd love to know if their Oshitari actually has the accent still!
So yeah, that's Kansai-ben in a nutshell. I'm obsessed with it now, gotta learn some of it XD Thanks for putting up with my horrible fangirling ♥
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 01:59 am (UTC)I understand there are at least two other dialoects besides the normal Tokyo- and Osaka-ben ones, but I don't believe I've encountered them. Perhaps because of the comedic association with Kansai-ben, it's a more popular dialect to use.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 02:02 am (UTC)Seriously, I bought the manga in Japanese (what there was of it) about six years ago, when I was just a J101 student - and the Kansai-ben gave me nightmares. But many years of Japanese later, and it's not so bad (at least, not in manga and anime. In RL? OMG SAVE ME).
Dialects that now scare me more include: Hokkaido-ben, circa 1920.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 02:05 am (UTC)especially when the mouth using it is OSHITARI. And now I'm curious--what's 1920s Hokkaido-ben like?no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 02:19 am (UTC)"Sou jaro ga no" - what I'm guessing from context means something like, "Sou ja nai ka"
"Yabacchii tokoro de" - where I'm assuming that "yabacchii" is something like "yahari" or "yappari" or something equally positive, given the context.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 02:23 am (UTC)