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| - The Tohoku Regional Accent is spoken in the northeast region of the Japanese island of Honshu, mainly in Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures. Not as often heard as the Kanto or Kansai dialects in anime and manga, when it does show up you can be sure the character in question is a hick from the boonies and will not likely be taken seriously. The accent also carries the stereotype of laziness or clumsiness, as Tohoku speakers are known for slurring and not opening their mouths very much. The rather negative nickname for the dialect is zuuzuu-ben, "zuuzuu" being the sound that a Kanto speaker hears when a Tohoku speaker neutralizes and drags their vowels. Because of the negative stereotypes, when speaking with Tokyo-ites, Tohoku speakers tend to hide their accents
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| abstract
| - The Tohoku Regional Accent is spoken in the northeast region of the Japanese island of Honshu, mainly in Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures. Not as often heard as the Kanto or Kansai dialects in anime and manga, when it does show up you can be sure the character in question is a hick from the boonies and will not likely be taken seriously. The accent also carries the stereotype of laziness or clumsiness, as Tohoku speakers are known for slurring and not opening their mouths very much. The rather negative nickname for the dialect is zuuzuu-ben, "zuuzuu" being the sound that a Kanto speaker hears when a Tohoku speaker neutralizes and drags their vowels. Because of the negative stereotypes, when speaking with Tokyo-ites, Tohoku speakers tend to hide their accents and speak in Tokyo dialect. The accent only shows up when talking to family or when stressed. When a Tokoku accent is translated, expect to hear something like a hillbilly drawl remniscent of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Most prominent features of the dialect include:
* Saying waa instead of watashi, and ora instead of ore (the latter even among women)
* Saying kero instead of kudasai/kure
* using da after verbs, considered a mistake in other parts of Japan
* Using be in place of darou or the equivalent verb conjugation (with a variety of particles even farther from the norm in localized areas). The slogan "ganbarou" ("let's hang in there"), ubiquitous since the earthquake on 11 March 2011, is "ganbappe" in the dialect of the disaster area.
* Drawing out vowels, which makes speech sound "lazy" or "slow".
* Pronouncing both /i/ and /u/ as an identical, in-between vowel (/ɨ/) after /s/ and /z/ (and sometimes /t/ and /d/ as well). "Sushi", susu (soot), and shishi (lion) all sound the same.
* Slurring vowel diphthongs together (a feature also common to Shitamachi tough-talkers in Tokyo): /ai/, /ei/, /oi/ and /ae/ come out as a prolonged [eː] (omee instead of omae, wagannee for wakaranai). The speakers themselves are said to be able to hear the difference between /ai/ and /ei/ regardless, but to people from Tokyo, they sound identical.
* Voicing of unvoiced consonants in the middle of words, especially /k/ to /g/ and /t/ to /d/. For example, suki datta (I liked it) becomes sugi dadda. It's also why the name of Ibaraki Prefecture (technically part of Kanto, but on the border with Tohoku) is frequently misspelled as "Ibaragi". To an English speaker, these vowel and consonant mutations make it sound somewhat like Tohoku-ben speakers are talking through a bad cold. It must be those harsh winters up north. On top of these features, individual dialects are also prone to preserving certain traits of old Japanese that are no longer present in the Standard language, for example:
* Being able to distinguish between two types of long /oː/ from the historical /au/ and /ou/ diphthongs (one is /ɔ:/, the other /o:/)
* Preserving the distinction of /ka/ and /kwa/, /ga/ and /gwa/ in Chinese-derived words
* Pronouncing the entire /h/-row of kana as /ɸ/ ("f" with upper and lower lip, not teeth), which is only done for the "fu" syllable in Standard Japanese. This is actually how the /h/-row was historically pronounced in Middle Japanese.
* Pronouncing /e/ as "ye" ([je])
* Distinguishing /o/ and /wo/ (both [o] in Standard)
* Pre-nasalization of voiced consonants, which sounds like inserting an /n/ sound immediately prior to the affected letter. For example, mado (window) becomes mando, and mago (grandchild) sounds like mang-o (the /g/ ends up assimilating, so the there is like English "sing"). This is somewhat common with /g/ in most Japanese dialects, but in Tohoku it still happens before /b/ and /d/ also. Though no two versions of Tohoku-ben have the exact same combinations of slurred sounds and archaic features, they are generally lumped together on the basis of the defining characterstics that make them "zuuzuu-ben" in the eyes of Tokyo speakers. And, since Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe and only Kansai Dialect gets any attention in media, who's to care if a pastiche gets used instead of a specific local brogue? (Kansai-ben is often abused the same way--using Osaka speech for anywhere in the region, apart from Kyoto--but people in Kansai complain. Loudly.) See also: Kansai Regional Accent. Compare "Rural" in British Accents, "Hillbilly" in American Accents. Examples of Tohoku Regional Accent include:
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