I know what you are, but what am I: Examining Japanese as a gendered language

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2013
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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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.
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