Male speech pronunciation changes for i-adjectives


I learn Japanese from many sources including movie or anime. unfortunately
Japanese often pronounce it different from actual word that make me often
failed to find the translation, for example すごい becomes すげえー, でかい becomes
でけえー, たかい becomes てけえー. so my questions are:

  1. How does this work? Is it that simple just replacing おい、あい to えー？because I think never hear someone saying kawee for かわいい。

  2. Are there any Japanese male versions other than replacing あい、おい to えー OR な vs ね?




There are no hard and fast rules, but 'a' and 'o' sounds in い-adjectives are
often turned into glottal stops, like たかっ、せまっ、はやっ、すごっ、おそっ、etc. Among them,
some 'a' sounds are also changed to 'e' sounds, like the すげー in your example,
or きたねえ etc.

On the other hand, 'u' sounds are sometimes changed to 'i' sounds. For
example, わるいー＞わりー、さむいー＞さみー. Apparently, this can sound a bit girly or
childish, but that's open to interpretation. Again, this doesn't apply to all
'u' sounds. You could use さむっ！ to emphasize the cold too, for example.

In any given language, there are always words (usually very commonly used
words) which adopt unique characteristics that cannot be applied to other
words in the same linguistic category. Unfortunately, it's just one of those
things you have to learn through experience and use. There may well be
phonetic constraints on which words can be changed, but I'm not aware of any
linguistics papers which have focused on this kind of phonotactic conversion.

