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INTEREST: Animate Stores Will Screen 1st Attack on Titan Episode in Kansai Dialect

I think it's about time we stopped using the term "Kansai-ben". Different parts of Kansai region have different accents. I wish Japan was as progressive as America.

Since I spend most of my time in Osaka opposed to Tokyo, I always get a kick out of how folks in Kansai love to make fun of people from the kanto region. Incidentally, I love when people in Tokyo comment about the Osaka accents, especially when you can clearly hear their own accent from Sendai, Sapporo, Akita, Fukuoka.

yaki-udon wrote:

I think it's about time we stopped using the term "Kansai-ben". Different parts of Kansai region have different accents. I wish Japan was as progressive as America.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to instead think of it as a series of related accent rather than one single distinct one.

So I guess this is roughly equivalent to that old American English dub of Mad Max?

Or maybe that short-lived semi-Americanized NBC dub of the British animated series Stressed Eric?

Or how there are 2 different North American English versions of Rock and Rule, Canadian and American?

Foxaika wrote:

Perhaps it would be more sensible to instead think of it as a series of related accent rather than one single distinct one.

This. "Kansai-ben" is basically just the colloquial word for what Japanese linguists call "Kinki-hougen" (yeah yeah, go ahead and snicker), one of the major dialect groups within Western Japanese. Dialects that are part of it are spoken in most of the Kansai region, except for parts of the northern coast and a weird language island in southern Nara and Mie (the dark grey areas on the map). But then, many people outside the region say "Kansai-ben" when they mean specifically "Osaka-ben", which is sort of like saying "the New England accent" when you mean "the Boston accent".

Tenchi wrote:

So I guess this is roughly equivalent to that old American English dub of Mad Max? Or maybe that short-lived semi-Americanized NBC dub of the British animated series Stressed Eric? Or how there are 2 different North American English versions of Rock and Rule, Canadian and American?

More like this, except for a whole episode and not just a couple of scenes. Kansai isn't an independent country, so it doesn't get its own official dubs; this is just an extended joke based on stereotypes and the dialect's apparent hilarity to people from Tokyo (and there are also people from Kansai in the comments laughing at how fake it sounds). And no, Chrno2, they don't really need a dub, since everyone in Japan understands standard Japanese, and aside from its pitch accent the Kansai dialect isn't that different from the standard compared to some of the other dialects out there (also, Kansai is one of the most urban parts of Japan).

[...] I wish Japan was as progressive as America.