Southern accents in dubs

J

johncoolgun

New member
So I started watching Peacemaker Kurogane and on a whim I watched some of the dub. It was fine and all but for some reason, I don't know why, a lot of the of the side characters and civilians have southern accents. And I'm like "Okay this is taking place in the times of the Shinsengumi, why do so many people sound like that?" And this isn't just in Peacemaker. I remeraber some characters in Rurouni Kenshin having that accent too and in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi the main characters did too.

Now, I somewhat get why they did that in Shopping Arcade but I really don't get why it was like that in the other two shows since they take place in a really older time period. Is there some sort of accent that the dubs are trying to mimic in them that I'm missing?
 
I just figure that with old Texas dubs, some of the voice actors had accents, and they didn't bother directing walla sessions for crowd scenes. Also, as great an actress as she is, you can always hear a hint of a Texas accent in most of Wendy Powell's roles. What's ironic is that Robin from One Piece lost her Southern accent when the dubbing moved from New York down south to Dallas.

EDIT: Yeah, a quick Google search revealed that it's how the dubbing companies replicate the Kansai dialect, specifically Osaka-ben.
 
Bingo. A lot of companies use the American Southern Accent to replace the Japanese Kansai Accent. To quote Wikipedia...



It also involves a lot of contractions - again, from Wikipedia, often "chikau" becomes "chau" and "omoshiroi" becomes "omoroi." So, harsher sounRAB, a more flowing language, lots of shortening and corabining and such... sounRAB like a Southern Accent to me. So, I'm good with it.
 
See, I got that already. I had figured that Southern Japan=Southern accent but it just seemed so weird to hear it in anime that take place in Shogunate times.
 
Actually, historically, the Kansai Accent was considered the "regular" accent before the capital moved north to Tokyo, and the Tokyo Accent was considered the funny one.

...

And now you know?
 
And knowing is half...oh forget it.

Okay, that makes more sense now. I didn't think ADV would have done that kind of research for this but then again, I watched FUNi's "Baccano" with perfect dub accents so I guess that's something.
 
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