Barakamon
Summary
Barakamon is a slice of life manga about Seishuu Handa, a calligrapher from Tokyo. After getting into trouble at a calligraphy contest he uproots his life and moves to an island on the Westcoast of Japan. There he gets his first experiences with country life, and finds out he doesn’t know a single thing about a daily life that’s not in the city. Through meeting a local kid called Naru, who calls Seishuu ‘Sensei’, he learns how to navigate the intricacies of the rural life, and through that he finds himself again.
五島列島方言 (Gotō ben)
The Gotō island dialect (五島列島方言), also called Gotō ben (五島弁), is a Japanese dialect spoken in the Kyūshū prefecture and is one of the many Japanese dialects. While Gotō ben is similar to the dialect spoken in Nagasaki prefecture (Nagasaki dialect), the Nagasaki dialect has attributes unlike to the Gotō islands. Within the Gotō Islands there are different variations of the Gotō ben, depending on the area.
The Gotō islands are situated in the East Chinese sea, of the western cost of Kyūshū and are part of the Nagasaki prefecture. This group consists of 140 islands with the 5 main ones being: Fukue Island, Hisaka Island, Naru Island, Wakamatsu Island and Nakadori Island. The distance from the highest located island to the lowest spans about 85 kilometres. The main products of the islands are oysters and sea urchins. The island group is famous for its fishing spots and beautiful beaches.
The characteristics of Gotō ben are strong consonants and weak vowels which it has in common with the general Kyushu dialect. Normal for the Gotō dialect are the extreme simplifications made on the language. There are no words with more than 7 characters and the words are mostly cut off after the 3th character. Overall there is no specific accent within the Gotō dialect, with the exception of Western Sinjo Gotō town and the southern part of Gotō city. In the Gotō dialect some words are different. For example: 可愛いbecomes みょうか, in the sentence: あの子は可愛い（That girl is cute）、becomes in Goto ben: あん子はみょうか。. The Gotō dialect is fully showcased in the manga Barakamon, which is staged in Fukue Island.