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Answerman - Is Japanese Language From Anime Different Than Normal Japanese?

Regardless, for those who are interested, the example that was given in the article ("jyanai" to "jyanee") was an example of vowel fusion and is one of three distinct features of wakamonokotoba (young people speak). The other two features of wakamonokotoba are nasal syllabification ("tsumaranai" to "tsumannai") and contraction ("sore wa" to "sorya"). These are actually way more common that the article would lead you to believe and it's pretty much how most young people in Japan speak to each other.

Personally, anime has played a pivotal role in my Japanese language education.

But also, as others have pointed out, I think that it really has to do with the kind of anime you watch as well. I don't think it's a good idea to homogenize all anime when you really have an extremely wide variety that covers everything from formal political diatribe to high-school banter. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to differentiate between all the different kinds of Japanese speech styles was because of how many different kinds of anime I exposed myself to.

I don't think that any of those are particularly 若者言葉, unlike the examples in that article. Most of those things right there are pretty common Tokyo accent features and have been for decades. The contraction example you offer in particular is something that's been taught in standard Japanese as a foreign language textbooks for decades. It's true that things blur because sometimes features that come from one particular region's accent become fairly standard young people's speech around the country (kind of similar to all the various stereotypical role language that you mention). So I'm sorry but I think that while the original argument wasn't perfect, it was more accurate than your comment.

Yes! It's true that the examples I pointed out are more indicative of casual speech/fast speech in Tokyo dialect than specific features of wakamonokotoba per se. The lines are blurred, as you have rightly pointed out, and I was trying to make the point that young people are more likely to use these kinds of casual speak among themselves as opposed to adults in formal situations. Thanks for pointing it out!

Anime is horrible for learning Japanese, by and large, so you shouldn't try to learn it via that way.

It's a bit like Arabic. You wouldn't want to learn the Arabic they speak in Morocco or Algeria. That's unintelligible. You learn Modern Standard Arabic so you can speak to everyone.

However, one of the things that I can definitely say is unique to fiction is role language or yakuwarigo. These are elements of language that are used to instantly tell the viewer what kind of character is on-screen in just one sentence to save on time that would have otherwise been used on characterization. One of the most common ones is roujingo (old man speak) or hakasego (professor speak). If you've watched enough super robot anime, you'd know that almost all old men or professors always use the first-person pronoun "washi" instead of "watashi" and end their sentences with "wai" or "nou". This is 100% exclusive to fiction as people don't suddenly change the way they speak when they become a certain age. In fact, the origins of this date way back to when Kyoto was the capital of Japan and most of the learned individuals came from the west of Japan and spoke with a western Japanese dialect (Kamigata style). The stereotype was born and this was then propagated by popular culture and media up till today. Other varieties of role language include military speak (de arimasu), ojou-sama speak (koto) and more.

Anime is horrible for learning Japanese, by and large, so you shouldn't try to learn it via that way.

So people ion Japan speak in a similar manner to a middle class Victorian family?