Hello everyone! This is going to be a collaborative project. So please join the efforts.
Dialects are still a bit of a mystery to me, and maybe to many others as well. So this is a place for people to check what’s the dialect of this thing they’re spending time with, or to find something with a specific dialect, to practice. All is good: anime/manga, videogames, doramas, novels, films, podcasts, Vtubers, if it’s in Japanese it goes in here. Second post will be a wiki, I’ll start with the only item I’m pretty sure of.
Tagging @Mods in case this is something the WK writers can help with; if it is, please let them know about it. Also, if the project gains traction and the wiki gets more and more items, it might be a good idea to pin this thread
List of dialects and works. Please note that some works feature more than one dialect.
Fukuoka dialect
Yakuza 7
Gifu dialect
Yuru Camp
Hiroshima dialect
Manabi Ikiru wa Fuufu no Tsutome (学び生きるは夫婦の務め)
Yakuza 6
Hokkaido dialect
Erased
Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!
Yakuza 7
Nagoya dialect
Yakuza 7
Okinawa dialect
Yakuza 3
Ōsaka dialect
Azumanga Daioh
Cardcaptor Sakura
Jarinko Chie
Lovely Complex
Yakuza games in general
Saga dialect
Zombie Land Saga
Sasebo dialect
Kids on the Slope
Tokyo; Yamanote dialect
Death Note (?) - note: like most anime, characters in Death Note speak run-of-the-mill standard Japanese, not exactly Tokyo dialect (there are differences); maybe remove this entry?
Tokyo; Shitamachi dialect
Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
Tsugaru dialect
Flying Witch
Mashiro no Oto
Yamagata dialect
Swing Girls
There might be more specific details about the works below (in fact, this is encouraged), so please use the search feature if you’re interested in anything in particular, or ask if you can’t find what you’re looking for
Maybe not all of the main cast, but Sakura and Saki definitely do. So do a lot of the background random mob characters, like the policeman and other townspeople.
Swing Girls is delivered almost entirely in Yamagata-ben.
Every second Asadora is made in Osaka, and generally set somewhere in western Japan, while every other one is made in Toyko and set somewhere in eastern Japan. I did a translation of one of them, and had to learn both Osaka dialect and Hiroshima dialect.
You’re not referring to a person’s spouse, are you?
I’m not sure there’s a single thing called Kyuushuu dialect, though… There are just so many dialects in Kyuushuu, e.g. Hakata-ben, Kumamoto-ben, Kagoshima-ben, just to name a few that come to mind. Here is a much better classification of them: Japanese dialects - Wikipedia
If you know which one of those dialects is spoken in Sasebo City in Nagasaki Prefecture, that’s the exact city where Kids on the Slope takes place, I’d be happy to correct it. I’ll change it to Sasebo dialect in the meantime.
For anyone interested, I posted a Fukushima dialect deck on Kitsun. They are mostly from LINE stickers of common phrases along with a few other youtube samples. They have a bunch of dialect regions to choose from though I would trust a native from that region to clarify the standard Japanese unless you are a dialect wizard.
Hm, I’m no expert, but I skimmed that link and it looks distinct enough to be considered its own language. Still, it is spoken in Japan, and if there are works that use it, they can go into the wiki with the “another language” caveat.
