Lately I have been watching a lot of streams and videos of Persona 5 The Royal, which has only released in Japanese. One character in that game very frequently exclaims "いよっしゃあ{LLHHHH}", "iyosshaa", which sounded strange enough to my English-speaking ears that I felt compelled to look it up, just to find no definition that I could read! It seems to roughly correlate with "Yeah!" or "Alright!", and does not strike me as terribly formal. If this is dialectal, the game is set in Tokyo, and in particular the area around Shibuya. I am very curious as to the precise range of meanings carried by this word or phrase, and what its origin may be.
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1Related: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/28073/%e3%81%84%e3%81%84-versus-%e3%82%88%e3%81%84-when-do-you-use-which/28078#28078, https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/52608/what-is-%e3%81%a3%e3%81%97%e3%82%83-here – Nov 04 '19 at 10:52
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1I'm almost sure that it's いよっしゃあ{LLHHHL} in accent. – broccoli forest Nov 08 '19 at 15:24
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When you pronounce や, ゆ, or よ, you’re basically making a smooth transition from い to another vowel. They sound very much like いあ, いう, and いお. That’s why いやだ is so readily reduced to やだ in colloquial speech.
Likewise, the い in いよっしゃあ is just an emphatic lengthening of the initial sound in the exclamation よっしゃ.
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I knew something was up with how much was lengthened or geminated, thanks! – Saklas Nov 04 '19 at 20:31