Kansai-ben (Shelby)

I’d heard from many people before I came to Kansai Gaidai that if I went there, I would have to deal with Kansai-ben. I didn’t think much of it, it’s just more Japanese that I would have to learn, or at least get used to, right? So far, that’s mostly how it’s been-- I’ve listened to how people speak, and while some things took longer to figure out, and sometimes an explanation, I figured out the common expressions they use here. I also learned that many students here, or at least many of the ones that I’ve talked to, aren’t from the area and don’t know Kansai-ben.

Kansai Region

A couple of the first words/phrases I heard and noticed were うち (uchi) and ~へん (hen). For the longest time, I could not figure out why people were saying うち. The only thing I could think of when they said it was “house,” and that made no sense at all, making it hard for me to follow the rest of what they said. It wasn’t until a day in Japanese class, several weeks in, that I learned うち is used in the same way as 私 (watashi). After that, things made so much sense since I wasn’t focused on the thought, “What does any of this have to do with a house?”

I had a much easier figuring out when people used へん at the end of their verbs. This was mainly thanks to a lot of context-heavy situations when people didn’t understand either what I was trying to say or they just didn’t know an answer to a question. Then they would use 分からへん (wakarahen) instead of 分からない (wakaranai). It still took a long time to puzzle it out, but I was able to do it myself.

Kansai-ben examples

Since I’ve been here, I haven’t really heard anyone talk about Kansai-ben, other than to say that they don’t know it. The people who do know it, as I mentioned in another post (I think), don’t seem to know which words are Kansai-ben and which are “standard” Japanese. In a way, as Furukawa-sensei mentioned during a recent class, this is kind of a way in which they take pride in their dialect-- they don’t have the same kind of boundaries that those with other dialects in Japan do. They don’t try to speak “standard” Japanese to people because they either don’t feel a need to or don’t know the difference in what they’re saying to what is considered “standard.”