Yesterday, I decided to start playing a certain famous game that was released only in Japan by Sega in 1996. One of the characters in this game speaks using the Kansai dialect. I have no difficulty understanding this dialect, but listening to it for the first time in a while reminded me that while I can understand it, I can’t speak it myself and I also don’t understand how it actually works. This, then, led me to doing some research on the dialect and how it works.

While I was doing this research, I thought about the perception of this dialect and how it has been portrayed in various forms of media. Somewhere around the same time, I realized that English has something similar with its various different accents and that people have difficulty placing my own place of origin due to my own accent, with even my own aunt once telling me that I sound like a Canadian.

I thought about how these various dialects are used in media, as well, and I realized that this sort of usage is very similar in both English and in Japanese. As I began to type this blog entry, I also realized something else; I have also studied both German and Spanish, and while I have basically forgotten the overwhelming majority of what I once learned about both of those languages, I do distinctly remember a few things about regional dialects for both of those languages, as well. My German teacher was from Switzerland, and she once explained some of the differences between Swiss German and how German is used in other places very briefly. One of my friends is also from Switzerland, and I asked him about some of the differences several years ago.

Perhaps a better example, or at least one that I have more familiarity with, is Spanish. In schools in the United States, the type of Spanish that I was taught is the type of Spanish that is used in Spain. At the time, I was living in Florida at the time and many of my friends and classmates were actually native Spanish-speakers, as they were from countries like Mexico, Peru, and Cuba. Many of them thought that the Spanish that the school taught us was sort of odd or that nobody used it in the real world. Later, I realized that they were talking about the various differences between Spanish dialects and that my friends were used to hearing the type of Spanish spoken in the dialects that they learned.

In any case, I thought that it’s somewhat interesting that I can still understand the Kansai dialect despite not really understanding how it works and not being able to use it myself if I wanted to. For now, I think I will continue to practice using what I have learned already, but I may start to do some research into various Japanese dialects, as I find the subject rather interesting and because it may be useful as long as I live in Japan.