INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
During my summer 2019 study abroad experience in Japan, I constructed an independent research project that examines linguistic differences between male and female Japanese speakers. Sociolinguistics is the combined field of linguistics and sociology, and focuses on how social factors, including gender, class, race, and occupation influence language use. As a disclaimer, for the purpose of this research project, I will be focusing solely on the traditional gender binary, and solely on the Japanese language. When examining gender and how it influences linguistics, it is important to recognize that gender is much more complex than simple biological sex differences, and is a combination of social perceptions and stereotypes that sort people into two different social spheres: male and female. Moving away from biology, my research explores the perceptions, expectations and unspoken rules that govern how males speak differently from females. A major theme in my research is that humans are not scientific instruments, and that their behavior is neither easily predictable nor simple. I have compiled both literature analyzing the differences in male and female speech, as well as qualitative personal interviews with Japanese university students to answer my guiding research question: How have perceptions and rules of male and female speech in Japan changed over time?
I chose to study gender after our discussions of the underrepresentation and marginalization of Japanese women, and the pervasive image of their role as submissive housewives. I began studying Japan during the Tokugawa Era, where deviation from social class was punishable by death. While Japan has modernized technologically extremely quickly, socially, some of these strict hierarchical social expectations are still present, and there is a deep rooted desire for harmony within the country. Women were deemed equal to men in the post WWII constitution but still face social oppression, especially in the workplace. I was curious to see, as Japan modernizes and women gain more authority legally and socially, how these changes have affected language use.
Unlike in the United States, the feminist movement in Japan has been less focused on changing Japanese language to be more inclusive and less rooted in masculine superiority, so it will be interesting to explore the extent to which rules have changed, if at all. My initial hypothesis was that there will be generational changes noted in male and female speech differences, but that there will persist expectations of female politeness and formality that do not exist for men. Upon conducting personal interviews with university students and one older woman, I found that their perceptions complied with my hypothesis. Humans are often very aware of the socially acceptable manner that different people are expected to speak with. To explain this qualitatively and quantitatively, I explored quantitative studies chronologically that already exist in the linguistic community, and then followed this research with my own primary data that consisted of qualitative interviews.
In approaching my research, one of the biggest barriers I faced was that I did not speak any Japanese. Because of this, I was limited to papers in English, introducing possible biases, as many of the papers I read were written by foreigners studying Japan from an outside lens, which could amplify overgeneralizations or misunderstandings.
In Japanese, there are two distinct sets of sentence endings that are generally exclusive to gender. This is reflected in a morphological deletion in interrogative and imperative sentences. When asking questions and given commands, females rarely use the particle ka and kure, unlike their male counterparts. When asking the question “Will you write the letter,” men will say tegami-o kaku ka? while women will say tegami-o kaku? When telling someone “write a letter for me,” men wills say tegami-o kai-te-kure and women wills say tegami-o kai-te. If women use ka or kure, it is very noticeable because it is so out of place. Non-Japanese women who marry Japanese men, and learn Japanese by listening to men will often face social stigma as they use male sentence endings. It is often considered inappropriate and rude if a female uses this male endings. The exception to this rule is if the sentence is uttered in a joking, comical manner, but in public and more formal situations, it will almost never happen (Reynolds 1985).
In one of my personal interviews, I also learned that there are large differences in the vocabulary used by men and women. There are completely separate lexicons for men and women, something that is not seen in English. For example, the male word for rice is meshi, while females use the word gohan. The male words are usually associated with strength and give the impression of a powerful speaker, while the female words are gentler and softer sounding. Many women will add go or o to the beginning of words to make them sound more gentle (Mizuno 2019).