| abstract
| - As stated elsewhere, Japanese includes several words or word-variants on the same concept to address the culturally important concepts of politeness and formality. This comes strongly from Japanese culture (after the Tokugawa Shogunate period, which had a caste-based society) as a hierarchical and stratified society where class relations were paramount. Japanese social stratification also occurred along gender lines. Because of this, there is a distinct difference in the way men and women are expected to speak, with some words and constructions considered more masculine and others more feminine. The feminine words are called "onna kotoba" and the speech habits "joseigo". Some examples of this can be seen in the Japanese Pronouns entry. Other examples:
* Sentence endings of "wa", "wa yo", "wa ne", "da ne", "no ne", and "no yo" are usually feminine. "Kai", "zo", "to", "ze", "sa" and "yo" are more masculine.
* Women often speak in a higher register above and beyond that attributable to physiology.
* Women tend to use polite forms more frequently. For instance, they are more likely to say "ocha" rather than just "cha", making it more formal. However, in formal situations, such as at work, members of both genders would be expected to say "ocha".
* Women tend to omit the copula form "da" in favour of "desu". For men, it is the other way around. However, "desu" is considered to be polite Japanese for both genders; men using "da" in formal contexts would be rude. In real-life situations, there is considerable variation—and several outright exceptions—to the rules. However, in media, a character speaking in a manner that does not traditionally fit their sex adds a different dimension to him or her that non-Japanese speakers would miss. In the recent years, linguists and social commentators in Japan have noticed a shift in women's speaking habits. Very few younger Japanese women use so-called joseigo anymore, and the speech habits of anime characters and drama characters do not represent modern-day Japanese women in real life (especially the relatively younger crowd). That is not to say that women's speech habits have become masculine; rather, they have become neutral. Also, do note that all this is a matter of vocabulary and social usage of the language. Grammatically speaking, unlike, say, most Romance languages such as French and Spanish, Japanese has no concept of gender; indeed, it didn't even have a separate pronoun meaning "she" until European texts started to be translated into Japanese, at which point one was invented (and is now in common use). Examples of Gender and Japanese Language include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)