Stylized Language Used in Anime

It’s got to be a challenge for anime creators to come up with fresh and interesting characters for fans to enjoy, but fortunately they’re quite good at inventing new variations on facial features, hair ornaments and endearing personality quirks to make their characters unique. The popular new anime Chunibyo demo Koi ga Shitai (“Regardless of My Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur, I Still Want a Date”) is the story of Yuuta, a Japanese high school student who spent his junior high school years pretending to be a magic-using video game character but who now wants to lead a normal life…so naturally he’s surrounded by cute moe girls who won’t let him. Kyoto Animation has come up with some great characters, including the eye patch-wearing Rikka who does that cute protective thing with her arms whenever Yuuta bops her on the head, and Shinka, the cutest girl in class, who also spent her early years engaging in childish fantasies that she now wants to erase. My favorite of the batch is definitely Sanae, the clumsy girl who uses her twintails as weapons to fight with. As is often the case in anime, Sanae speaks in a highly stylized way, essentially putting desu on the ends of all sentences that don’t need them. The end result is cute, although no one in the history of the country ever spoke this way. Just as it’s not a good idea for Japanese learners of English to say, pattern their speech after the fictional character of Yoda, it’s important for anyone studying Japanese to avoid trying to learn too much from anime.

Sanae speaks a fictional dialect of Japanese.