Hey everyone! 
I hope everyone had an amazing weekend!
Last time we talked about the history of 草 （くさ）and how it is used on the internet. While explaining the origins of this, a board from 2chan (２ちゃんねる) * was mentioned very briefly, and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to give a brief explanation on 2ch and the board なんでも実況板 （じっきょういた）, or more commonly known as なんj, before making any more post about memes and internet slang since many of the slang and memes I will be introducing originate from this board on 2ch.
Quick note about 2ch
- In 2014, the rights to 2ch was seized by Jim Watkins, the domain provider, and renamed it 5ch. After this, ひろゆき started 2ch.sc. I am not going to go in depth and explain what happened in detail, but the important thing is that since 5ch was running on 2ch’s server, people stayed on 5ch instead of jumping ships to Hiroyuki’s new 2ch website.
- In this post I will be referring both 5ch and 2ch as 2ch for simplicity sake and since that is what most people still call it to this day.
So what is 2ちゃんねる? 
2ちゃんねる is an anonymous bulletin board (匿名掲示板（とくめいけいじばん）) founded by Hiroyuki Nishimura (ひろゆき) in 1999. Within 2ちゃんねる, there are different 板（いた）(boards) that are categorized into different topics. Within those boards, there are スレッド (threads) which are user submitted topics.
If you are familiar with Reddit, 板 is similar to a subreddit, and スレッド is equivalent to posts made by individual users. Any comments made after the OP (which is referred to as １・イチ・イッチ) is called a レス (short for レスポンス or ‘response’ in English).
The Great Migration
When 2ch started, it had a variety of boards, to talk about many different topics. Although it had many different boards, it was predominantly used by people who wanted to talk about anime, games, or anything related to subculture. Among these boards, which were geared towards ヲタク (Geeks/Nerds/Otaku), there was a board called なんでも実況板. In Japanese なんでも means ‘anything’ and 実況 means ‘live commentary’. As the name suggests, this board was created to discuss an ongoing program or sports as it was being broadcasted on TV so that it felt like you were watching TV with a bunch of people. It was basically like the comment section of a live stream before live streaming was a thing.
However, this board was predominantly used to talk about baseball. You may wonder, why would the baseball fans use なんj instead of using their own boards? They surely had a baseball board right? Yes, they did have their own board.
The reason they used this board is because, as you could probably expect, the baseball boards and the sports boards that already existed were filled with die-hard fans who would get into very heated arguments about technicalities and what not and because of that, it was a toxic place for your everyday baseball fan.
Due to the hostility and the toxicity in the sports boards, many baseball fans ‘immigrated’ to なんj since the residents there (known as なんj民 or おんj民) were far more relaxed when discussing sports. When they ‘immigrated’, they brought in エセ大阪弁 （えせおおさかべん）(fake osaka accent) with them.
エセ大阪弁（えせおおさかべん） was used a lot in the baseball boards since that was the kind of Osaka-ben that 岡田彰布 (Japan’s number 1 Hanshin Tigers fan) used in interviews. People on the baseball boards started using エセ大阪弁 to make fun of Hanshin Tiger fans, but by the time of the migration, it was just how they talked (on the baseball board). After a while this also became the official language of なんj, and this is why words/phrases such as「ワイ」「〇〇やん」「〇〇やろか？」「せやな」「せやろか」「すまんな」and「ええんやで」are seen a lot there.
The ‘Normies’
Although this was ‘officially’ made into a baseball board, people on that board would still talk about random stuff during the off season. This would be equivalent to people on /r/MLB talking about how their new neighbor keeps parking in their spot, or someone on /r/UFC asking if they knew how to apply for health insurance during the off season. As time went by, まとめブログ (compilation blogs) started to pop out of nowhere, and they started to pick up interesting and funny threads that were posted on there during the off season.
Due to these blogs, many people who would have never used 2ch started to flood into the website.
Many of these people have only seen the non-baseball threads being picked up by these blogs, so they had no idea that they were coming into a ‘baseball board’, most people thought it was just a board where people just talked about random/funny topics (as the name suggested).
As more non-baseball fans flooded the board, the baseball fans/original residents started ‘attacking’ the ‘normies/otaku’ and vice versa. Although there were tensions between the new and the old users in the beginning, なんj became a very diverse place eventually, and this diversity lead to more threads unrelated to baseball. This meant that more words (unrelated to baseball) were being made up to make typing faster/easier or to make something sound more humorous. Since なんj became so popular to the ‘normie’ population, terms and slang used only on なんj started to leak out into the real world (like 草), including the use of エセ大阪弁 （えせおおさかべん）(We will explore this in the future).
Due to how popular and big this website became, terminology and slang are not the only thing to come out of it. There have been times where popular threads were published as books/movies/series. The most popular example is probably 電車男（でんしゃおとこ） and the most recent example is きさらぎ駅（えき）. To this day, new words are being invented there and it is constantly finding its way out into the non-2ch world.
This has been a long ramble about a single board, but now you have an idea of where these words came from and why you see a lot of ‘大阪弁’ on the internet.
There are many threads that I have read in the past, but I would like to leave you guys with a thread that I thought was funny. 【名作スレ】モスバーガーのきれいな食い方教えれ - サンブログ. I do not want to say anything to spoil the thread, but all I want to say is, please don’t let this thread discourage you and please don’t doubt your Japanese skill when reading this.
今週はここまでにするンゴ。ほな、また来週〜
Fuga
Don’t forget to check out the previous posts!