The Japanese-media-by-dialect Project

Erased uses pretty heavy Hokkaido-ben (though no one talks like that anymore irl, which is sad)

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Posting here as a personal reminder to check this out later! Might ask my girlfriend to confirm anything you’ve got, as well.

My memory is failing me, do you currently live in Fukushima as well?

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Should Yuru Camp be added to the list as well? I haven’t read it in Japanese, so I don’t know how pervasive the Gifu dialect is in the story. I actually haven’t read or watched anything I’ve added to the list myself. I’ve just heard people discuss them before, eheh.

And how specific do we want to split up the dialects? From what I understand, Ōsaka dialect and Gifu dialect are types of Kansai dialect, and are fairly similar to each other, so should they be separated, or lumped together as Kansai dialect?

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Wait, so is Kansai a family of dialects?

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Mino-ben (= dialect of southern Gifu) bears similarities to Kansai-ben, but it’s regarded as part of the Tokai-Tosan family rather than Kansai. So’s Hida-ben (the northern Gift dialect).

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I mean yeah! Dialects seem pretty much like coastlines, their amount can increase drastically (if not forever) the more granular you want to measure. So it might make sense to talk about Kansai dialect in some contexts and Osaka or Kobe dialect etc. in others (Osaka and Kobe being cities in Kansai).

It’s like how in America, “Southern dialect” might mean “Texan” or “Kentuckian” or both or neither depending on what you want to talk about or where you want to draw the lines.

The distinctions are gonna get really complicated fast and there’s going to be a lot of gray areas.
Looking at how Wikipedia does it here:

It looks like they arrange it between 東日本方言 and 西日本方言 (and others, like 九州方言) and large subgroups for regional dialects like 近畿方言 (/関西弁), with further subcategories beyond that for dialects related to specific cities (or domains).

Maybe roughly that kind of structure could work for the thread’s wiki?

Pretty interesting to click around and look at! It would be interesting to see how granular the distinctions would/will get just from people listing media where it comes up. Most of the time surely it won’t be so specific, but sometimes.

Anyway - to add something to the pile myself, I’m sure the Yakuza/龍が如く series has dialect business come up quite a lot, but one specific fun case I can remember from encountering it recently, is a subquest in 龍が如く維新, where you, playing the real historical person Sakamoto Ryoma (but presented basically just as the regular protagonist Kiryu with no accent and playing extremely fast and loose with actual history), who was from 土佐藩, in modern day 高知県 on Shikoku, have to help a Kyoto-ite out by translating a letter from someone else written in thick 土佐弁.
(not really sure where best to write in English or kanji with a subject like this…)
It was an interesting but difficult subquest for me frantically trying to look dialect up on my phone! That’s certainly not a dialect I knew anything about before that…

Which come to think of it, raises a whole other question of historical dialects… I don’t know that that game particularly goes in that direction, but I’d imagine there’s some works that do.

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Welcome! Feel free to edit the wiki :blush: same goes to @Belthazar and @rodan

Yes it should! This has been covered when talking about Zombie Land Saga - if it’s only a few characters who use the dialect, then that information should be discussed in the thread, I’ll add a reminder to the wiki for people to use the search feature and find more data.

A great idea but I don’t know anything about that :sweat_smile: so I’ll leave it to others lest I mess up :stuck_out_tongue:

Furigana shall be your salvation hehehe, if you feel like adding it, or using it in the future, it will let you go for any kanji-English ratio you wish :blush:

I have not read it in Japanese, but there’s 道産子ギャルはなまれめんこい (EN: Hokkaido gals are super adorable). As the title suggests it has Hokkaido dialect in it. The main character moves to Hokkaido, so he’s in the same spot as most others being exposed to 北海道弁. It’s actually pretty wholesome series for a romcom harem. You can read it on shueisha jump+ website. They voiced the first chapter, so you can get a feel for it here:

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I’m US based but wife’s family is from Koriyama, so she helped clarify meanings for that deck. Some sayings are used more than others depending on certain regions (if I remember correctly, sea side and inland can further nuances along with city vs. country side areas, ect). Hoping to crack the code some day :muscle:, dialects are just gasoline on a fire of language challenges.

Are you and your girlfriend in Fukushima? Would be happy to work together on a dialect list!

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Yes, help from natives is invaluable

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Before I go and ramble- as for the OP, anybody here a more die-hard fan of Haikyu than me? I feel like I remember there being some Miyagi/Fukushima/Tohoku-ben in there, as well as the obvious occasional Kansai-ben in episodes/volumes with that one team.

I am, I’ve lived here 3 years now, going on 4! Girlfriend grew up in the area so her parents/grandparents speak the local dialect pretty heavily (I live pretty deep in the inaka. ‘Little’ region called Minamiaizu).

The frequency of usage definitely changes regionally. さすけね is really common in my area, and you’ll even here a ねっかさすけね (意味:全然問題ない) on occasion, but you rarely here it in other regions. Similarly すっぺ is more common over towards Iwaki on the coast than in Aizu.

I would absolutely love to get a dialect list going! I actually fully intended on doing something like that soon now that N1 is out of the way. Looks like you’ve gotten a great start so far! I’ll compare it to some of the Fukushima stickers I’ve got as well and see if there are any more easy ones to throw in.

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I just remembered that the Yakuza games have a few different dialects in them as well. Kansai-ben, in particular Osaka-ben is pretty much in all games. Yakuza 6 has Hiroshima-ben. Then there’s bits and pieces in the other games, although I don’t remember how pronounced it was, I’ll name it anyway. Okinawa-ben in Yakuza 3. Fukuoka/Nagoya/Hokkaido-ben in Yakuza 5.

I played Yakuza 7 in English, so I don’t know if there’s a specific Yokohama dialect in it.

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Haikyuu! reading club is pretty die-hard, lol! They have a nice vocab list. Admittedly, I haven’t read anything (yet) but I really enjoyed watching the series so I’ve been following their vocab list and updating another kitsun deck for Haikyuu generated by the gracious learners in the club, so there may be dialect example there (it’s been a while, if they had dialect examples I probably didn’t recognize them at the time).

Had さすけね and すっぺ but not ねっかさすけね, nice! Will add that one then.

Congrats! An amazing feat, I recall following the your reviews on the 日本語の森 course so it must have been helpful.

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Thanks for all the Yakuza info! About Yakuza 5, does it have all three of them, or are they too similar to each other, or is there something else I’m not getting here? :thinking:

Definitely not too similar, as those places are spread all across Japan - the game just takes place in Fukuoka, Nagoya, and Hokkaido :slight_smile:, along with the usual settings of the series in Tokyo and Osaka.

I played through it extensively in Japanese, and I don’t remember any particular dialect moments off the top of my head. Some local lingo and some Korean/Japanese and English/Japanese language crossover discussions but I don’t remember any thick Yokohama accents (it may well be too close to Tokyo for that anyway).
It’s certainly possible some characters were written with a little bit of flavor that went over my head though.

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Wiki is growing
Me likes it

When I think about different dialects aside from Kansai and Tokyo, the first thing that comes to mind is this video on the Akita dialect. Cracks me up every time.

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Yakuza usually takes place in one or more cities based on real location, but fictional. So Kamurocho is based on Kabukicho and it’s recurrent place that represents Tokyo or Kanto even in the series. Another popular place is Sotenbori based on Dotonbori in Osaka, representing the Kansai side. There’s also multiple protagonists, and in 5 they kinda went wild with both.

Locations in Yakuza games

Yakuza 0 - Tokyo/Osaka
Yakuza 1/Kiwami - Tokyo
Yakuza 2/Kiwami - Tokyo/Osaka
Yakuza 3 - Okinawa/Tokyo
Yakuza 4 - Tokyo
Yakuza 5 - Fukuoka/Nagoya/Sapporo/Osaka/Tokyo
Yakuza 6 - Onomichi/Tokyo
Yakuza 7 - Yokohama/Tokyo

Besides Japanese, the series will also have some form of Chinese or Korean incorporated in them, as well as some English. They all have excellent translations in English, but if you’re gonna play them in Japanese it’s definitely a challenge. I tried the demo of 7 and it was too much for me at the time.

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@Greya
Yuru Camp added to the wiki, and to my watch list :blush:

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I’ve added Death Note to the Tokyo Dialect, that’s accurate right?