There’s a certain way Goku talks in the original Japanese version that isn’t conveyed in the English dub of Dragon Ball.
So don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Funimation dub of Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT. Shoutout to Sean Schemmel whod did a really great job at bringing Son Goku’s voice to the West. However, I will always prefer Masako Nozawa, the Japanese voice of Goku. Fun fact: the series creator Akira Toriyama himself casted Nozawa as Goku despite the other producers trying to convince him otherwise.
Despite living in the West in the 90s, I actually grew up watching the Japanese language version of Dragon Ball Z thanks to my local video store having the VHS tapes on sale. It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I began to watch the Funimation dub of the series. And there was something I noticed about Goku in the English dub – he has really good English.
So why did that pop out to me? In the Japanese version of Goku, he speaks with a slangy speech. Which is typical for male Shonen characters in anime and manga. However, there’s an additional layer to his speech that make him sound… for a lack of a better term… slangy. Which makes sense for the character, considering he grew up in the middle of nowhere by himself after his grandpa died.
His a’s are e’s and e’s are a’s
Goku does this thing where he changes the e vowel sound into an a sound with most words and vice-versa.
In Japanese, most personal pronouns have a certain connotation behind them. In fact, there are three common ways to refer to yourself.
- Watashi is the most generic pronoun. It is neither masculine nor feminine.
- Boku is used predominantly by males and gives a masculine impression. Females who use this are referred to as bokkuko.
- Ore is another pronoun used predominately by male and is actually used by strong tough guys in anime.
Goku uses the ore pronoun but he adds a slur to it and turns it into ora. It’s such a unique way of pronouncing the pronoun that he and Shinnosuke from Crayon Shin-Chan are the only characters (to my knowledge) in all of anime to do this.
In fact he doesn’t just do this with his pronoun, he also do this with other words such as omae (a very impolite way to refer to someone as “you”) by pronouncing it as omee.
Sometimes he properly pronounces the ore pronoun
There was a time when Goku pronounced ore correctly and it was when he became a Super Saiyan during his fight with Frieza. It’s such a departure from his usual way of talking and it really did separate his angry mindset from his usual carefree way of talking. This change in speech appears after more than 200 chapters into the manga series so imagine the impact on readers who’ve been following the series since the beginning.
Since the English language only has the the singular, first-person pronoun “I” it couldn’t convey this in the English dub. Which is fine, it was still cool to watch.
When Goku becomes more accustomed to using the Super Saiyan form however, he reverts back to pronouncing it as ora.
Lack of formal speech
In the Japanese language, there’s layers of politeness ranging from casual to polite to humble speech. One’s level of formality in their speech changes depending on you speak with. If you are talking to close friends and family, then you could speak using casual speech. If you are speaking to a teacher, you would use polite speech or teineigo. If you’re talking to a boss then you would use respectful speech or sonkeigo; this includes avoiding the slurring of words or using slang in general when speaking to a person of higher status.
Goku however, uses the casual speech with everyone regardless of social status. In Dragon Ball Super, we get to see Goku attempt to use the formal speech of the Japanese language with the Destruction God Beerus who commands respect. Although he does a really bad job at attempting to speak in such a manner. For example, when he first met Zamasu, he said something using casual speech and then added the polite verb desu right at the end thinking it would make the sentence any more formal.
I think the English dub of the series did a really great job of bringing Goku to the West. However there are so many aspects of Goku’s speech that adds to his character in the original language version. With that said, I don’t think anyone’s missing out just because they don’t know Japanese but I still think learning these traits of Goku that’s only apparent in the Japanese dialogue adds so much to the character.