Osaka Dialect Understanding for Japanese Literature Students

Natalia Desianti Tanzil, Utari NovellaBina Nusantara University

nataliatan37@gmail.com, utari.novella@binus.edu

Abstract

This research focuses on students of Japanese Literature majoring in Bina Nusantara University towards Japanese dialects especially the Osaka dialect, and focus on the structure of the sentence of Osaka Dialect (OD) and the Standard Japanese (SJ) itself. Many students have heard and learned about Osaka dialect from various media. But not many students know about the equivalent of the Osaka dialect in standard Japanese. Osaka dialect is the most widely recognized on of the Japanese dialect. An understanding or application of the Osaka dialect can be considered important because can understand the different structures that exist in standard Japanese and Osaka dialect, to avoid misunderstanding or miscommunication that is might happen. The method used in this research is by distributing questionnaires to students and looking for the use of the Osaka dialect in the 8UPPERS film, which has many Osaka dialects. Then the data from the film were analyzed in descriptive analysis looking at the differences in the structure of standard Japanese and Osaka dialects

Based on the data on the use of the Osaka dialect, it can be concluded that Osaka Dialect tends to shorten and obliterate the sound from the verb of standard Japanese. For example, the sound in standard Japanese’s word chigau shortens into Chau in Osaka Dialect, meaning “wrong”, “different”. There were also changes on standard Japanese’s sentence-ending word such as ~nda and ~nanda, that turns into ~nen and ~yanen. Changes can also be seen on standard Japanese’s ~naide form changes to ~n’toite in Osaka Dialect. The sound in the present form of a sentence ending word such as ~teiru also changes to ~toru. There were also differences between the ~n and ~hen form that equals to ~nai form.

Keywords: Student understanding, Osaka Dialect, Standard Japanese, Structure