Hello everyone I'm trying to learn Japanese and I have a question. So a lot of the time i hear characters use ne instead of nai. For example when Eren says " shinitaku ne ". Shouldn't it be "shinitakunai"?.I searched it on the internet and couldn't find anything. Could someone explain why is that? Is that a thing, replacing nai with ne or I just don't hear well?
by Shoddy_Revolution554
7 comments
If it is long e as in 死にたくねえ then it is Kanto dialect (and the sound change from ai to ee is quite common).
〜ない becoming 〜ねえ is pretty common in casual speech (especially among males) and VERY common in anime. To me it gives a bit of a gruff, masculine vibe.
Good job noticing it! It’s a type of non-standard Japanese dialect, originally from the Kanto (i.e. Tokyo region) area. (Yes, there is ‘dialect’ in every part of Japan, even in Tokyo where people are convinced they’re speaking ‘standard Japanese’!) It’s heard in media a lot though, so sometimes you’ll hear it IRL even outside the Tokyo area.
The vibe of saying ねえ instead of ない is coded as masculine and ‘rough’ sounding, so you definitely won’t hear delicate or feminine characters speak with it in media.
Examples.
じゃない → じゃねー or じゃねえ
うるさい → うるせー or うるせえ
すごい → すげー or すげえ
たかい → たけー or たけえ
and your example from Eren:
死にたくない → 死にたくねー or 死にたくねえ
Its very casual. Also stuff like すげえ、知らねえ、うるせえ and so on
I bet all the characters you heard saying that are male? Because that’s considered a casual, sometimes rough, way of speech by guys in Japan.
dialect?
Sometimes people speak in a way that is not the “proper” pronunciation of words. We see that in English with words like “going to -> gonna” or replacing the ‘ng’ sound at the end of verbs with ‘n’.
Japanese is no different. 死にたくない is the correct form of the word but in less formal speech it is sometimes said like 死にたくねえ。