OX King and Chi Chi speech pattern

[peter291]

Since I do not speak japanese I'd like to ask you about Chi Chi and OX King's dialect. Is this strongly noticeable in the anime and manga?

Translators of the polish version of the manga wanted to make it as close to the original as possible. Due to that there are situations where language and grammar are not proper. Chi Chi and Gyuumao's dialect sounds weird, a lot of people complain about it. How does it sound for the japanese speakers? Was it included in the english version of the manga? (As far as I remember it wasn't in the anime)

[Herms]

Kei17 could explain this better, but they talk in a sort of quasi-Tohoku Dialect. So ai/oi sounds are slurred into ee, which is the same as with Goku, but su sounds become shi, which is something Goku doesn't do. What's more, unvoiced consonants become voiced (ie k becomes g, to becomes d) sometimes, they stick "n" into the middle of words, and often end their sentences with be...to give some rather imprecise examples. They also refer to themselves using Ora, the same hickish first-person pronoun Goku uses, stick the copula verb da in places it doesn't belong, and Chi-Chi shortens the honorific san to sa. And there's other things too, but you probably get the idea. All of this is very, very noticeable when the two first appear, but by the time of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai it's much less pronounced in Chi-Chi's speech, being mostly reduced to her slurring her consonants and using da, be, Ora, and sa. The same seems true of Gyumao when he reappears. They still talk more hickish than Goku does, but it's not as extreme as it was when they first appeared. This is all just going off of the manga though; Goku's hickishness gets turned up a notch in the anime, and the same might be true for Chi-Chi and Gyumao for all I know. In the Viz translation the two start off with pronounced hick speech patterns at first, but this stops rather abruptly midway through the Mt. Frypan storyline. Can't remember how the two are handled after that, other than Gyumao using the phrase "in a dog's age" at the start of the "Z" era.

[peter291]

Thanks, that's a lot of useful information. Pity, that it's so difficult for non japanese speakers to get everything from Dragon Ball. Being aware of japanese language and culture, probably can give different point of view on story or characters.

[Haji]

I watch DBZ mainly in Japanese and i do catch some things Chichi says like Goku sa and a few others.