Background
Since Osaka is the largest city in the region and its speakers gained the most media exposure over the last century, non-Kansai-dialect speakers tend to associate the dialect of Osaka with the entire Kansai region. However, technically, Kansai-ben is not a single dialect but a group of related dialects in the region. Each major city and prefecture has a particular dialect, and residents take some pride in their particular dialectical variations.
The common Kansai-ben is spoken in Keihanshin (the metropolitan areas of the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe) and its surroundings, a radius of about 50 km around the Osaka-Kyoto area (the zone colored orange in the left map). In this article, it is mainly discussed about the Keihanshin version of Kansai-ben in Shōwa period and Heisei period. Dialects of other areas such as Kii Peninsula and northern Kansai have different features, some archaic, from the common Kansai-ben. Tajima and Tango (except Maizuru) dialects in northwest Kansai are too different to be regarded as Kansai-ben and are thus usually included in the Chūgoku dialect. The Shikoku dialect and the Hokuriku dialect share many similarities with the Kansai dialects, but are classified separately.
Read more about this topic: Kansai Dialect
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