Fun with Dialects and Accents

Sorry Yuki, I'm gonna write about 大阪弁 a little bit.

For those of you who don't know (i.e. 99% of my readership), 大阪弁 (Osaka-ben) means the Osaka dialect, or what is probably more accurately the Kansai dialect of Japanese. Last week at the Bible study we do at Keio University every Thursday, I met a guy from Osaka who taught me some stuff in Osaka-ben, and I've been looking for places to use it ever since. In case you guys don't know or haven't noticed, I really enjoy learning languages (or I guess you could say I'm a nerd when it comes to learning languages), and so even though this isn't very "useful," as some people have pointed out, I'm learning it and having fun with it anyway. Some friends of mine said the same thing when I taught myself to read/write Korean. Actually, Korean has turned out to be almost completely non-useful, but like I said, I don't really care anyway.

So anyway, at church I'm learning that Japanese friends of mine are always eager to awkwardly introduce me to new people that I really don't have much in common with based on (in my opinion) little unimportant side-issues. For example, last week I told someone I could speak some Spanish from studying it in high school, and he immediately called over a couple at the church from Peru and told them I spoke Spanish, in spite of my protests that I hadn't spoken it much in more than a year. Our conversation ended up being them asking simple questions in Spanish, and me answering them in Japanese--I could understand what they were saying but if I had been forced to answer in Spanish it would have taken me forever.

This week, once I started saying a few things in the Osaka dialect, once again a friend of mine brought me over to two people who were already in a conversation together and (from my point of view) kind of interrupted their conversation to tell them about me. And the only reason was because they were both from the Kansai region--i.e. they spoke Osaka-ben. Actually though, even though it was a little awkward at first, they were pretty happy to teach me all kinds of new stuff, half of which has already fallen into that category of "I recognize it but can't use it" words (i.e. forgotten words). Still, it's fun learning all the different ways to say things I already know, like new ways to say "really?" and "is" and some region-specific phrases that everyone in Japan knows and associates only with that part of Japan. It was also funny to hear that one of the guys I was talking to was at a store in Tokyo when all the employees gathered around and told him to "say something!" just to hear his accent. It sounded so normal, or to me, so American, that it was funny to hear of that happening in Japan too.

As for America, I feel like while we do have different regional "dialects" of sorts, the major differences between areas are merely in pronunciation, and there aren't that many actual words that only people from a certain area use. "Y'all" comes to mind fairly quickly, but that's really the only one, so I guess I'd consider the regional differences to be more accents than real dialects. That's not to speak of ebonics or anything like that, which I think is technically much closer to a the definition of a dialect than regional differences are. But anyway, now I'm curious--has anybody else ever learned a dialect (or specific accent) in another language, or been used as an example of one for someone who didn't know?