I know what you are, but what am I: Examining Japanese as a gendered language
Date
2013
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
When speaking Japanese there are a number of factors
that can affect the speech style that the speaker uses,
such as age, gender, role and relationship to the listener.
This can make Japanese difficult for the second language
learner to master. In this paper I examine one of the most
difficult-to-grasp aspects of the Japanese language:
gendered speech. Whereas in English the speech styles of
men and women can generally be differentiated through tone
and inflection, Japanese male and female speech styles are
almost like two different languages. These different speech
styles can be broken down into many pieces, such as lexicon
and sentence final particles. The use of these different
aspects of the Japanese language can tell volumes about the
person using them, and when used in literature they are
very helpful for defining a character's personality.
For this paper, I focus on the different forms of the
first person pronoun 'I' in the Japanese language. In
Japanese one can use several different words when referring
to one's self, such as boku, ore, atashi, uchi and watashi,
to name a few.
My goal for this study is to show how the gendered
speech of Japanese is used in both conventional and
unconventional ways, and to explore the question of whether
gendered language is instinctual in Japanese or whether it
must be learned and reinforced by society. To delve deeper
into this topic, I look at several works that examine the everyday use of language by men and women of varying sexual
identities, as well as Japanese comics, or manga.