のう：Alternative to 〜です?

[Stephilica]

Hello everyone! I recently started reading the manga あかやあかしやあやかしの, and one of the characters has a speaking pattern that is really confusing me.

This is a supernatural manga about a bunch of yokai living in a shrine on a hill overlooking a human town. While the leader of these yokai appears to be a young girl, she is really a very old fox spirit. I’ve noticed that she often uses more formal speaking, sometimes switching to keigo or using more formal pronouns such as お主 or 我ら. She tends to end her sentences using のう, as per the examples I’ve put below. My question is whether this particular construction is an alternative to です or if it serves some other function, especially as in some sentences it seems to replace ね. I am familiar with the (sometimes feminine) sentence-ending の; is this just some weird spelling variant?

Examples: 「候補」が二人居るならば、まずは選ばせんことにはのう。」
「厄介じゃの、食事とは。のう、さとうさん？」
「本当にお主達は仲がいいのう。」

[Leebo]

It’s just a written representation of a particular pronunciation of the sentence ending particle の. The question below covers other spelling variants as well.

What does ぉ character mean in のぉ?

[jneapan]

This is a speech pattern you’ll often see in fiction that is usually used for old and wise characters (at least that’s how it usually is). They’ll say わし or 我 for “I, me”, お主 for “you”, おる instead of いる, じゃ instead of だ and use の/ のう sentence ender instead of ね or な. It’s something called 役割語. If you want to read more about it, this article is a good introduction:

Introducing yakuwari-go (役割語)