What is this weird Japanese?

Japanese Language Grammar
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This is what someone on HelloTalk has written in their profile:

わしゃロマンスいらぬでな😂
(The emoji is part of the profile)

It’s simple enough to get the meaning - they don’t want romance. But the grammar/vocabulary is obviously strange. And the rest of the profile is very standard, easily understood Japanese. So is this a funny dialect? Or just a funny way of writing? What’s funny about it? What sort of person would speak like this?

My guess is that it sounds overly formal and perhaps like an elderly person, but that’s just a hunch. Tell me what you think!

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I’m not sure what わしゃ is, but ぬ is a more classic way of writing ない.

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私は, methinks.

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Also could be わしは here, I suppose. If it’s an old dude.

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That too crossed my mind.

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My rikaikun extension is saying it’s 話者 - speaker or narrator. Maybe it’s a weird slang way of saying I? “The speaker doesnt need romance”? XD

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話者 is a fairly uncommon linguistics term that doensn’t really jive with the tone of the sentence, despite being pronounced the same way.

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My Japanese friend told me わしは is a personal pronoun and いるぬ means “don’t need”. Asked whether they thought old or young speaker, he said usually older people would say that way.

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Maybe pretending to sound like an old dude for comedic effect?

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If it’s out of place with the rest of the profile then I would guess it’s a reference to something (movie/book/anime/speech style/etc.)

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That was my thought too, but Google wasn’t particularly forthcoming on that front.

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speaking of uncommon terms, I’m loving that you used the word “jive,” it needs to make a comeback

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I think this is a mix of archaic grammar and Kansai-ben:
わしゃ is a reduction of わしは
いらぬ is an archaic いらない
でな is a Kansai structure meaning からね. It provides a reason or strengthens a statement by making it feel like a kind of justification:

As evidence of sorts, this came up when I googled ‘いらぬでな’ in quotes:
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~os_sally/64words/srw64_23oz.htm
The bit of dialogue in which いらぬでな is used clearly seems to mean ‘… there’s no need for me to keep you alive. I don’t need two hostages.’ The final sentence is clearly a justification for the one before it, and would quite naturally end in からね・な in more standard Japanese.

All put together, I think it feels something like an old man saying, ‘Cuz I don’t need romance, y’know?’

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Amazing answer, thanks for doing the research!

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