Japanese women's language 012640030X

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H. Kindaichi 1957; Mashimo 1969; Miller 1967; Nomoto 1978; Oishi 1957; Ozawa 1973). Few of these characteristics have been studied in detail, authors generally preferring to fall back on favorite anecdotes or samples from literary works that display the most charac­ teristic sex-differentiated forms. Reasons for this preference may be found in the traditional mode of linguistic analysis in Japan.

Linguistics and Sociolinguistics in Japan The study of the interrelations between language and society in Japan has a well-established historyj nonetheless, it is often referred to as a new area and one that has, ihoreover, been imported from the West, primarily from the United States, under the name sociolinguistics. One reason for this neglect of their own traditions on the part of Japanese scholars is that two separate schools of language study exist, charac­ terized by significant differences in choice of topics for study, methods of data collection and analysis, and principles guiding the interpreta-

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tion of research findings. Differences between the two schools with regard to goals and methodologies are, in fact, so significant that new­ comers to the field often experience considerable difficulty integrating the findings of one school about a given phenomenon with those of the other. This problem has adversely affected progress in a number of areas— analyses of nominal particles and their functions in sentences, the relation between case particles and word order, the auxiliary verb sys­ tem, and so on— as scholars affiliated with each of the two schools pursued their investigations in isolation from and, often, in seeming ignorance of, the other. Moreover, associated with each group is a smaller group of linguists who address themselves to the relation be­ tween language and sociocultural factors; as these linguists also work within the general frameworks established by the school with which they are associated, the same problems of integration and communica­ tion obtain. Kokugogaku (national language studies), the first of the major schools of language study, subsumes the subdiscipline gengo seikatsu (lan­ guage life) studies; the school termed gengogaku (linguistics) more di­ rectly influences the research programs of those who are engaged in the foreign-influenced subdiscipline shakai gengogaku (sociolinguistics). The largest body of work has been done by the former group, who have been in the field for a longer period of time. Kokugogaku, or national language studies, takes as its object of inqui­ ry the Japanese language. Insofar as it stands in opposition to the study of the universal principles of language in general, that is, insofar as its concerns are language-specific, it contrasts with and remains indepen­ dent of the field of linguistics (gengogaku). As both groups of scholars focus their attention on the same aspect of human behavior, language, it is natural that there be considerable overlap, particularly with regard to description. Whereas linguistics today is characterized by interest in cross-language investigations aimed at discovering the underlying sim­ ilarities between two (or more) superficially very different linguistic systems and by a concern for the links between the universal aspects of language and the nature of the mind, kokugogaku does not directly address either of these issues. Assumptions about the nature of lan­ guage and its relation to other aspects of human cognition do, of course, underlie the work of these scholars (see Bedell 1968); they are rarely, if ever, overtly referred to. Rather, kokugogaku concerns have centered around immediate descriptive goals. In part, this focus may have stemmed from the fact that, despite periods of close contact with the Asian continent and linguistic borrowings therefrom, there were also

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lengthy periods of relative isolation, after the last official embassy to T ’ang China in 838, for example, during which very little contact with other languages and language structures was forced upon Japanese lin­ guists. They were able to develop hypotheses about grammatical form and meaning sufficient to account for Japanese, untroubled by coun­ terevidence that extensive contact with other languages might have provided. A second factor was the overriding and immediate practical problem raised by the introduction of the Chinese writing system to Japan. The need to devise means of using Chinese orthography to en­ code Japanese served to focus the attention of those involved in the task on certain aspects of sentence structure, specifically case marking par­ ticles and verbal and adjectival inflections, which were not present in Chinese and which, therefore, had no Chinese written equivalents available for use. The appropriate way to deal with these parts of sen­ tences occupied the thoughts of linguists from the earliest times. How best to use the borrowed Chinese characters was, in fact, vir­ tually the only linguistic issue of the Nara period (710-784 a .d .) [Kokugogaku Jiten 1969); this is certainly understandable given the unsuitability of the adopted orthography for Japanese. Additionally, the nature of the relationship between the word and the object it repre­ sented and the magical properties of language were explored, but these speculations were little pursued in subsequent eras. The problems of the adaptation of the newly borrowed writing system, however, were pursued, and are to this day. By the Heian Period (794-1185), many of the initial problems had been solved, and scholars’ attention turned to the compilation of Chinese-Japanese translation dictionaries and dictionaries of other sorts. The development of phonemically based syllabaries (kana) in the sev­ eral years after 901 was a major achievement and one that led to kana becoming the normal written medium for Japanese language texts, as opposed to official documents and other formal works, all of which were written in Chinese (Miller 1967). This was a neat solution, and had the integration of the alien writing system with Japanese stopped at that point, generations of scholars might have been free to turn their attention to other aspects of linguistic form and function. In the early Heian Period, official and formal texts were written in Chinese, using Chinese characters; texts written in Japanese were written in the kana syllabaries. The process by which this very satisfactory state of affairs broke down is outlined by Miller (1967:130-131). Essentially there are two reasons for the breakdown leading to a more mixed use of Chinese characters and kana. First, the growing number of Chinese loanwords brought into the Japanese vocabulary were naturally written in the

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characters used for the Chinese originals. As these lexical items ap­ peared in ever broader sections of the Japanese lexicon, it was inevita­ ble that they be used in texts otherwise written in Japanese, as no native equivalents existed for many of them. This was in itself not highly problematic; as Miller quite accurately points out, “Chinese graphs for Chinese words was not a difficult rule to remember” (1967:130). The second factor effecting the breakdown of the clear-cut distinction be­ tween Chinese and Japanese texts, however, was problematic. This was the kanbun reading tradition, a practice of reading Chinese texts as if they were Japanese. Once this practice gained currency, it was a short step from writing Chinese and reading Japanese to, in Miller’s terms, writing Chinese even when “the intention from the beginning was to read . . . Japanese.” Miller goes on, In this way, writing in Chinese characters often became nothing but an elabo­ rate way of writing in Japanese. But since the various syntactic twists and turns to which the completed text in Chinese characters would have to be subjected in order eventually to make it come out in Japanese were exceedingly difficult to remember, shorthand reminders in kana were more and more often sprin­ kled among these Chinese texts intended to be read as Japanese. With this, the two writing systems . . . became once and for all inextricably entangled with each other. (1967:131)

The “fatal intermingling” (1967:131) of Chinese script and language with Japanese kana script and language had the effect, in my view, of focusing the attention of linguists on the areas that were difficult to encode orthographically, that is, on the morphemes that were neither unequivocally Chinese nor unequivocally Japanese and on morpheme boundaries. These areas dominated Japanese language studies for many generations. One of the first problems addressed by Kamakura (1185-1333) schol­ ars, in fact, grew directly out of the status of orthographic practices: In the context of organization and compilation of the classical literature, problems of forumulating rules for the correct use of the kana orthogra­ phy arose. This has remained a matter of interest to the present time. Japanese write verb stems with Chinese characters and their inflections with kana; how much of a verb stem is thought of as being encoded in the character with which it is written and how much is to be written out in kana varies both through time and across individual writers, and attempts persist to regulate this fluctuation. It is of interest to note that, whereas in England the same pressure to develop a systematic and accurate orthography led to increasingly refined techniques of phonetic transcription and ultimately to the birth of phonetics as a scientific branch of linguistics, in Japan this path was blocked at the outset by the

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prior need to distinguish between forms that should be written in Chi­ nese characters and those that should be written in the Japanese kana syllabaries. These morphological problems were of such magnitude that the phonological problems were scarcely touched upon until the introduction of Western phonetic techniques in the wake of the Meiji Restoration (1868). A second area of interest in the Kamakura Period was that part of Japanese sentence structure called te-ni-o-ha. This term came to refer to those morphemes that are now particles, auxiliary verbs, verbal and adjectival inflectional suffixes, conjunctions, and even a certain number of adverbial and nominal forms. These forms were initially precisely that set of forms that could not be treated easily within the scope of Chinese grammar, since they had no Chinese counterparts. They therefore naturally caused problems when the “fatal intermin­ gling” of Chinese and Japanese, which continues to characterize writ­ ten Japanese to the present, came to be the orthographic style of choice. Works such as Yakumo Misho and the Waka Koden of Abutani dealing with these forms began to appear early in the Kamakura Period. In these, the proper usage of the forms in the composition of poetry and song was discussed and their importance to poetics stressed. By the late Kamakura to early Muromachi eras (1336—1573), the meanings, usages, and syntagmatic relations to other forms of each of the te-ni-o-ha forms had been investigated; this research represents the precursor of gram­ matical-syntactic studies in Japan. As such, its influence cannot be overrated, as the effects of the early need to attend to accuracy and detail in the description of a body of extremely complex data in this area as well as in the area of kana usage (that is, the development of a stable orthography suited to writing Japanese) are felt in the field of national language studies to the present. Phenomena treated in the early te-ni-o-ha studies ultimately were divided into a number of subcategories, most prominent of which are the studies of particles (the te-ni-o-ha forms themselves) and the stud­ ies of verbal and adjectival inflectional affixes (katsuyo). A majority of the studies through the Edo Period (1600—1867) center around these forms and, by extension of these interests, to the construction of a variety of classificatory schemes for parts of speech. Until the appearance of Keichu (1640-1701), however, the con­ sciousness of scholars that they were addressing specific research ques­ tions, that is, the problem orientation of scholars in this field, was very weak and their use of evidence, consequently, fragmented and disor­ ganized (Saeki, Nakada, & Hayashi 1961). Keichu, a Buddhist priest who divided his attention to language matters between questions of

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formal structure and those of reinterpretation of classical texts, pro­ duced a work on kana usage in which he collected all the texts he could, organized them in a temporal series, identified regularities in kana usage for each historical phase, and inductively “discovered” the common rules of kan a use. His work provided a model for later schol­ ars that enabled them to limit their focus to specific problems of form or function and to base their arguments on evidence rather than on arbi­ trary personal opinion. This they did, producing solid descriptive work in the areas not only of particles and inflectional morphology, but also in phonology, etymology, and classifications of the parts of speech. National language studies remained, nonetheless, an ancillary field to kokugaku, Japanese classical studies, and research conducted under its auspices was viewed as no more than a means of realizing the goals of kokugaku. It is hardly surprising, then, that no systematic theory of language developed out of this research. Very little, if any, attention was paid to the development of such theories until after the Meiji Restoration (1868), when ideas about language and linguistics import­ ed from the West began to affect the direction of linguistic inquiry. The field of national language studies was significantly altered as a result of the impact of Western scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new lines of research initiated at this time show clear signs of the influence of European and American in­ terests; it is thus natural that the first new area to be opened to linguists was inquiry into the genetic relation of Japanese to other languages and its historical reconstruction using the techniques of comparative—his­ torical linguistics developed for the study of Indo-European languages, although there are some who doubt that comparative-historical tech­ niques have even today been properly understood and applied to Ja­ panese; (Miller 1971). Investigations on the grammar of Japanese continued throughout this period with an increasing separation of these pursuits from other disci­ plines such as literary criticism. The Saussurean distinction between langue and parole was introduced and stimulated a series of divisions within the discipline. The traditional studies on particles, verb inflec­ tions, and the parts of speech and their arrangement in sentences were continued and viewed as proper components of the investigation of langue. Dialect studies, stylistics, and the like were seen as studies of parole and investigated, in consequence, more as conglomerations of unrelated, albeit interesting, facts than as expressions of coherent systems. In the early years of Showa (1926—), grammars identified by the names of their original proponents began to appear. This is a charac­

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teristic of Japanese linguistics today: instead of structuralism, transfor­ mational grammar, stratificational grammar, tagmemics, and so on, there are the Yamada grammar, the Hashimoto grammar, the Tokieda grammar, and so on, all named after the individual who first proposed that particular method of accounting for the facts of Japanese. Why might this be? Both Teramura (1981) and Okutsu (1980) have suggested that this is so because the various grammars so identified have been, ultimately, individual views of how best to describe the facts of Ja­ panese as produced in writing and speech, rather than attempts to explain how Japanese (or any other language) may be characterized as a representative of human language in general. This tendency to strict descriptivism is intensified by the narrow focus of interest on Japanese alone as opposed to Japanese in comparison with other languages. This interest in detail and description rather than in abstraction in order to elucidate more fundamental underlying structures may have hindered the development of overarching theories under which all data could be subsumed. Furthermore, formulating either descriptions of or explana­ tions for a phenomenon or set of phenomena in terms of a single lan­ guage allows solutions to be fixed without concern either for the degree to which these phenomena are universal and thus potentially defining characteristics of human language or even, at a less ambitious level, for the applicability of the description or explanation developed in terms of Japanese to similar types of phenomena in some group of languages with similar general typological characteristics. The universal is, thus, swamped by particularistic detail. It is, further, easy to proceed straight to descriptions of phenomena without detailing analytical methods when one deals with a language thoroughly familiar both to oneself and to one’s readers or students. Okutsu (1980) lists a lack of concern for intersubjectively reliable methodologies at the levels both of data col­ lection and analysis as one characteristic of the work of national lan­ guage scholars; this leads to a dearth of descriptions in the literature of the principles upon which linguistic analyses are based. Indeed, it often seems the case that little thought concerning these matters has preceded analysis. Rather, the reader is left to guess at the methods used by the analyst to extract portions of sentences for investigation. The analysis rests upon the assumption, well founded for the most part, that the audience is equally competent in Japanese and equally able to make the same sorts of analyses of sentences as the investigator. An additional comment is probably in order at this point. Even granted that the investigator and his or her audience may have equal competence and may be equally able to parse sentences, it need not be the case that they are equally able to address the issue of how a sen­

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tence may be created. National language studies have typically been concerned with the analysis of sentences that already “exist,” an orien­ tation that is natural enough considering that the origins of gram­ matical study lay in the Edo Period attempts to order and systematize classical texts. There has been little interest in the processes by which sentences may be created and consequently no concern whatsoever with pushing at the boundaries of the notion ‘possible sentence of Japanese.’ By limiting themselves to the development of analytical schemes to account for sentences that already did exist, investigators were able to avoid having to ask themselves what sentences could (and, conversely, could not) exist; still less did they have to address the problem of why a sentence might or might not be possible. National language scholars were free to concentrate on the construction of sys­ tematic descriptions of Japanese in ways that surpass the descriptions available for most western languages. They have paid for their lack of comparative perspective by failing to produce either analytic tech­ niques or grammatical models that may successfully be applied to other languages. Western techniques and models were not unknown in Ja­ pan; there were areas of linguistics that readily accepted external influ­ ences, for example, dialectology and linguistic geography. Syntactic studies tended to shun outside influences.

Language Life Studies in gengo seikatsu, language life, developed from within the kokugogaku school and adopted its basic orientation toward detailed description and its relative lack of interest in cross-linguistic com­ parison (leading to, one presumes, the same relative lack of interest in the universal aspects of language form or usage). It has also shared in the failure to develop a comprehensive theoretical model; in this re­ spect, of course, it is entirely consistent with western-style sociolin­ guistics. As Japanese linguists became interested in the Western literature on the links between sociocultural and linguistic forms, they expressed themselves as welcoming the “new” discipline of sociolinguistics as a suitable candidate for import into Japanese linguistic scholarship. So strong is the inclination to view the study of language in its social setting as a western innovation that at least one scholar long involved in the study of language use in various social settings in Japan has felt it necessary to remind his colleagues of their own work in this area (Shibata 1975, 1978).

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Studies of language in its relationship to its sociocultural setting were not new imports to Japan from the United States when such stud­ ies gained currency in Japan in the mid- to late 1960s; gengo seikatsu (language-life) research has been going on in Japan at least since 1949. Much of it has been conducted under the auspices of the National Language Research Institute, established in 1948. One of the stated purposes of the institute, according to the law establishing its existence is to “conduct scientific studies regarding the national language or the language life of the country’s citizens and to put these together to build a sound basis for the rationalization of the national language.” In other words, since its inception it has been an institution virtually devoted to sociolinguistic investigation. Shibata (1978) identifies four primary areas of interest within the subdiscipline of gengo seikatsu. These are (1) issues related to the writing system, (2) honorific usage, (3) loan word usage, and (4) the process of language standardization. Language standardization has been particularly intensively studied in Hokkaido, where special prob­ lems exist due to the late settlement of the region. Shibata contrasts these areas with the primary foci of sociolinguistics in the United States and Europe, the study of bilingualism and of minority or ethnic group vernacular. These areas have received virtually no attention in Japan, despite the existence of ethnically divergent minority commu­ nities as well as an increasing number of bilingual children returning from extended stays abroad. It is possible that these problems will receive more attention as their needs are impressed upon the public and the government; it seems likely, however, that studies of these sorts will fall within the imported “new” discipline of sociolinguistics, not within language-life studies, and that theoretical orientations and methodologies will derive from sociolinguistics. Language-life studies have instead focused on problems that are nat­ ural extensions of the traditional interest of national language gram­ matical research and have to a large degree adopted their descriptive, particularistic focus as well. In fact, Japanese is taken to be a mono­ lithic structure wholly understood both by its users and by those schol­ ars investigating it, so that even methodological problems, for example, how to gather data, define the speech community from which data is drawn, and identify the contextual factors that influence changes, are left unexplained. There is still less interest in fitting the results of these particularistic studies into an overall explanatory model of language or even in the nature of written language. In part, this is the result of looking at sentences or language samples of any sort as in some sense “given.” Very little attention is paid to the

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problems of the speaker about to create an utterance, and these are the problems that force analysts to examine the relationship of individual to speech community, of speech context to specific utterance form, and other points at issue in western sociolinguistics. It is on this point that the language-life studies differ crucially from the Western-influenced sociolinguistic studies performed in Japan. The latter studies show the beginnings of interest in a careful examination of language produced in context and the beginnings of a concern for the question of just what kind of Japanese— formal versus informal; polite versus neutral; produced by upper-, middle-, or lower-class speakers— is being referred to at any given time. Of the issues central to language-life studies in Japan— orthography, the introduction and proper spelling of loan words, honorific usage, and language standardization processes—the latter two areas, in partic­ ular, provide considerable information about female speech. From the first comes evidence demonstrating that women’s speech is more po­ lite; from the second, evidence that women adhere more closely to standard forms than men do (or that they assimilate them more quick­ ly). The results of these studies that bear specificially on female speech are be dealt with in the next chapter. The conduct of gengo seikatsu sociolinguistic studies of honorific language is, however, outlined briefly here, as honorifics are a major focus of interest to both groups. Minami (1982) divides the investigation of the relation between so­ ciocultural forms or processes and language into three periods. The first, 1948-1963, saw the establishment of the National Language Re­ search Institute, charged with studying the linguistic life of the Ja­ panese people, and the commencement of numerous large-scale jittai chosa (surveys of actual conditions) aimed at determining the facts of language use. Two of the earliest of these concerned honorifics; the 1952 Ueno, Mie Prefecture survey and the 1953 survey of Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo 1957). In both of these studies, various characteristics of speaker and social context were matched to honorific usage. They constitute, moreover, the earliest studies of linguistic phenomena based on quantitative data. Informants were questioned about their attitudes toward various aspects of honor­ ific usage, the address—reference terms they used for various ad­ dressees, and the level of politeness of their imagined responses to specific questions asked in constructed situations. Responses to the questionnaires and interviews indicate that (1) longer forms are consid­ ered more polite than shorter forms; (2) utterances incorporating di­ alectal forms are considered rougher than those incorporating no di­ alectal forms; (3) women tend to use polite language to all addressees

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while men tend to distinguish addressees by differential use and hon­ orifics; and (4) although fairly polite forms are in fact used by speakers with reference to relatives, such usage is thought improper; and so on. These findings establish a framework for similar community studies in other areas of Japan and for follow-up studies of the original sites in the 1970s and identified certain aspects of honorifics as being of special interest; they also provide quantitative support for claims made in the linguistic literature about modern honorific usage. As such, they are invaluable contributions to Japanese linguistics. They also fail in certain crucial respects. First, and most damaging, is the failure to develop a methodology that would yield reliable data concerning speakers’ actual behavior. With few exceptions, the surveys have relied almost exclusively on interviewees’ statements about what they call a particular person, what they would say in a given situation, and what their beliefs are about proper honorific use. That the initial studies in a new area should rely upon self-report is natural enough; this is particularly so in Japan, where analytic methods were based on the dual assumptions (1) that the sentences (or utterances! to be ac­ counted for existed in some real form as intersubjectively verifiable fact and (2) that as a native speaker, either the analyst or the lay informant would have direct access to those facts upon introspection. Early lan­ guage-life researchers inherited these assumptions from their national language studies predecessors and, when they began to attend to varia­ tion across different sorts of speakers and speech situations, extended the notion of accessible language facts to encompass facts about which language forms occur in particular contexts. This, again, was a perfectly justifiable assumption in the early stages of language-life reserach; Gumperz (1971) and others have, however, demonstrated that speakers do not, in fact, know just what language forms they would choose in a particular context nor how much their choices might vary from event to event of the same type over time. Since these limitations are by now well known, it is distressing to observe the continued reliance on selfreport surveys even into the mid-1970s. (Surveys of this sort were con­ ducted in Tsuruoka in 1971-1972, in Okazaki in 1972, in the TokyoOsaka urban areas in 1974—1975, and in various industrial settings with regard to honorific usage in 1975.) Further, the very few studies based on naturalistic, recorded speech data (Shibata 1951, also re­ ported in Shibata 1978) focus on insufficient numbers of speakers to provide statistically reliable results. Indifference to those meth­ odological problems that have most concerned Western sociolinguists remains characteristic of language-life research in Japan, as ex­ emplified by the following:

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The basic methods in research on variation are simple. First, one conducts a survey of how many different sounds, words, or sentences there are to express the same linguistic meaning. Then, with regard to one or another of these elements, one analyzes who uses or how they use two or more of the variants, and clarifies or guesses at the sources of the variation. (Higa 1982:33)

How such surveys are to be conducted, what assurance the investigator has that natural, informal speech behavior has been accurately cap­ tured, and what analytic methods should be used to clarify the sources of variation are left unexplained in this view. A second failing of this line of research in Japan is the lack of larger theoretical goals, so that specific phenomena are not examined within the framework of specific problems but rather as only loosely articu­ lated collections of particularistic, albeit often quite interesting, facts. As a result, few generalizations about the relations between sociocul­ tural factors and language use are available even after 35 years of fairly extensive work. Those generalizations that have been made, for exam­ ple, that women’s speech is more polite than men’s, that early exposure to standard speech forms insures closer approximation to those stan­ dard forms in speech,— are both low level and unrelated to specific hypotheses about language development, change, or use. They do not provide useful evidence concerning the relation between linguistic and sociocultural competence. Finally, unlike later sociolinguistic research in the United States, language-life studies in Japan did not grow out of doubts about current linguistic models or characterizations of lan­ guage, and the research undertaken was not directed toward correcting or refining existing models; consequently, it is rarely the case that the information gathered in these studies can be used to sharpen our char­ acterization of the notion ‘human language.’ During the 1960s, generative-transformation interests dominated Ja­ panese language studies, and less attention was devoted to languagelife studies. In the 1970s, however, concern for the language life of the Japanese was renewed, this time under the influence of a “new” field introduced from the West— sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguistics In the earlier description of Western influences on Japanese national language studies in the post-Meiji Restoration, it was noted that within the field there were areas that seemed particularly receptive to Western ideas, such as linguistic geography, and those that seemed more or less closed to them. Foremost among the latter was the area termed k oku -

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bunpo, national grammar or syntactic studies. That is not, however, to say that no such studies were conducted along Western lines; many were, and indeed, many were conducted by westerners. As noted above, the earliest contact with Western linguistic schol­ arship was with late-nineteenth century historical—comparative lin­ guistics and dialectology. Work on Japanese was done in these areas by foreigners, who also began to describe colloquial Japanese for the first time. This was, naturally enough, not a focus of interest to Japanese scholars, who looked upon linguistic analysis as a tool useful primarily in the service of literary analysis and the development of theories about the creation of poetry. Foreign scholars, forced to acquire Japanese in very short periods of time, needed to have adequate descriptions of the structures of the language if they were to do so, and numbers of works grew out of these needs (Aston 1872; Chamberlain 1907, 1924). This work was spurred on by the spread of Saussurean notions, which gave a respectability to synchronic studies not previously available in a field dominated by historical considerations. Ono (1976) outlines three groups of scholars directly influenced by Western linguistics. The first are those Japanese scholars, like Otsuki Fumihiko, who were raised in Confucion traditions and with Japanese notions about the place and proper object of linguistic study within kokugaku (national scholarship) but who, in the years around the Meiji Restoration, were brought face-to-face with a new conception of scien­ tific endeavor. These men began to attempt objective descriptions of Japanese, descriptions in which no assumptions were held to be tacitly agreed to by both analyst and audience concerning the appropriateness of analytic decisions but were rather overtly justified and applied sys­ tematically across all the data under review. The followers and stu­ dents of these men did much to advance the study of Japanese gram­ mar, particularly of colloquial Japanese, and eventually produced scholars who did not emerge from traditional Japanese scholarship to confront new, alien ideas, but rather scholars who believed that the proper foundations of linguistic investigation were just those that ema­ nated from Western linguistics. After Saussurean ideas had been assim­ ilated, American structuralism was introduced and its descriptive methodologies and empiricist theoretical foundation incorporated into the work of Japanese linguists. They have been equally willing to at­ tend to and adopt the changing trends within the generative school in the latter half of the twentieth century; publication of Chomsky’s Aspects o f the Theory o f Syntax in 1965 triggered a spate of landmark works applying this model to Japanese (Inoue 1976; Kuno 1973; Kuroda 1965; Shibatani 1978). Applications of the government and binding

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framework (Chomsky 1981) have appeared (Farmer 1980; Miyagawa 1980), a tendency that is likely to continue (Akmajian 1981). Willingness to analyze Japanese within theoretical frameworks de­ veloped in the west, primarily within the United States in recent years, is desirable from a number of perspectives, although one might wish to see more reciprocity of role, with theoretical frameworks developed to accommodate Japanese data applied to English as well. Whatever the respective contributions, it is always useful to test a theory developed largely on the basis of a single language (English, in this case) against large bodies of data from another, quite unrelated, one (Japanese). If hypotheses hold across two languages, they lend credence to the idea of universality; if not, reformulation of the hypotheses to account for a broader range of language types is necessary. One can easily imagine the benefits to sociolinguistics as well; as Western sociolinguists are grappling with the issues of identifying the contextual and speaker-identity factors that potentially influence speech production, of defining the individual speaker’s relationship to his or her speech communities, and of delineating the process of on­ going language change, they must welcome studies of these same issues in non-Western societies. Some Japanese scholars have adapted their research to this new perspective. Since the appearance of Hymes’ semi­ nal articles (1962, 1964), these scholars have turned to examinations of the relation between linguistic competence and sociocultural compe­ tence. In a language with as many overt morphological and lexical markers of speaker-hearer and contextual differences as Japanese can boast, it would be hard to discount the magnitude of the influence of sociocultural factors on grammatical speech. It is, moreover, difficult to make clear-cut distinctions between grammaticality and acceptability of specific utterances; this is perhaps even more true of Japanese than of English, since so many morphological systems are inextricably en­ twined with sociocultural, that is, contextual features. At any rate, for whatever reasons (including changing trends and popularity), it has been very easy for Japanese sociolinguists to accept the notion that “if linguistic behavior is a form of social behavior, it ought to reflect the social relation within which it occurs” (Honna 1975). This acceptance holds at the levels both of performance (Honna’s ‘behavior’) and of competence, insofar as the distinction between the two has been ad­ dressed by Japanese linguists working outside the generative school. The competence—performance issue has been of central importance to American sociolinguists (e.g., Labov 1972; G. Sankoff 1974). Once the need to incorporate sociocultural contextual information into the grammar was recognized by Japanese scholars, attention

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turned to the task of identifying which sociocultural factors are of sig­ nificance to the Japanese case. The tendency has been, unfortunately, to borrow categories uncritically from Western sociolinguistic research and apply them to Japanese communities (Kunihiro 1977; Sato, 1974; Watanabe 1977); as Honna (1975:194) points out, however, in Japan it is not wise to take for granted either the composition of, or even the existence of, social stratification such as obtains in modern Western states. Honna gives two reasons for this; (1) the notion ‘social class’ is extremely unpopular among Japanese and (2) the concept, insofar as its existence is admitted, is interpreted so flexibly that social behavior is not consistent with social status. The variables found to be most accu­ rate measures of social class in the United States and Great Britain— education, occupation, income, and so forth— are not necessarily useful in interpreting the social status of Japanese. Honna concludes, “A vigorous attempt is imperative . . . to establish first of all the rela­ tion between linguistic behavior and social structure, and then to identify the social variables that influence speech forms in Japan” (19^5:195). The identification of an appropriate set of sociocultural variables is, ofcOurse. of prime importance for the future of sociolinguistic research in Japan. Jkt the same time, sociolinguists need not sit back and wait for their colleagues in sociology to complete their analysis of Japanese class, status, and role categories before any linguistic research is under­ taken. Indeed, linguistic variability can provide crucial evidence for the existence of certain categories. What, then, have studies consciously aimed at the sociolinguistic investigation of linguistic variability uncovered? Sugito (1977) reviews the literature on speech varieties and variables in Japanese, noting that speech behavior has been analyzed from six different perspectives: speaker identity, that is, sex, age, status, and so on; hearer identity; time; setting; manner, that is, written or spoken, formal or informal; and content or topic (Hayashi 1966; Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo 1951, 1957, 1971). Sanda (1979) details several studies of various aspects of the lan­ guage standardization process. The first, a study of honorific usage in Maya Shuraku, allowed investigators to conclude that there were sig­ nificant differences in pronominal, particle, and copular predicate forms across age, sex, and relative status of speaker-hearer dyads. In the second, changes in pitch-stress (akusento) patterns toward a more standard pattern were documented; the shift was seen to occur only in specific lexical items, but for those items to vary regularly both with age of speaker and with the speaker’s degree of access to speakers in

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

areas outside the community. Despite the lack of comment on statis­ tical significance of the observed differences, this is the sort of study to which western sociolinguists are well accustomed. Some comment upon the methods by which data were obtained, however, is in order. In the Maya Shuraku study, all residents of the village were inter­ viewed. They were identified for analysis by age, sex, occupation, and education level. In the interviews, the language consultants were given set situations and asked to state what the themselves would say in the situation. One of the scenes is as follows: If you were to point at an umbrella, not knowing who owned it, when there was no one but you and the addressee present, and ask “Is that your umbrella,” what forms would you use for you, the possessive, and the copula? Language consultants’ responses to questions such as these comprised the data that when analyzed, led to the conclusion that systematic differences in politeness existed between the sexes (female speakers being more polite than male speakers) aand among age groups (younger speakers being more polite than older speakers), and that relative status (a term not, however, concretely defined save by example) of the speak­ er and hearer also lead to differences in politeness. The second study asked language consultants to state what form of a set of lexical items they would use in an informal speech setting; it again depended upon self-report. The limitations of self-report— most particularly, the limitations on its accuracy— are discussed above and need not be reiterated here; we see, however, that even those investigations in Japan that are self-con­ sciously aimed at being a contribution to the sociolinguistic literature have taken over its concerns with the identification of the sociocultural factors underlying linguistic variation without adopting the western sociolinguistic concern for developing methodologies to supplement instrospection. It is likely that this derives from the assumptions dis­ cussed above of the sharedness of competence in Japanese between investigator and subject; there additionally exists the unexamined as­ sumption that all aspects of language structure and language use are equally accessible to introspection. Whatever the reasons for the nearly exclusive reliance on self-reporting, however, conclusions derived from such studies must remain tentative until supported by naturalistic observation or recorded interviews under conditions designed to elicit spontaneous utterances pertinent to the issues under discussion. It is not that there is not interest among Japanese sociolinguists in methodology; in 1978, a special issue of Gengo was devoted to this

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

47

topic. The majority of the articles in this collection, however, are de­ voted to discussing the problems of collecting interviewers for largescale survey-type projects and of getting potential interviewees to agree to participate in such projects (Nomoto 1978; Shibata 1978; Tokugawa 1978). Another issue discussed is selection of a site (Tokugawa 1978); the discussion, framed in the context of linguistic geographic surveys, centers upon the potential roles of natural topographical barriers such as mountains and rivers in delineating appropriate sites. Other prob­ lems of identifying speech communities and subgroups within those communities are not addressed, although Nomoto notes the need to obtain a representative sampling of the selected speech community and suggests random sampling methods. Under the heading of interview techniques, all three articles address the need for the interviewer to present a fixed list of questions (or a fixed word list) to the interviewees in a manner that is, insofar as possible, consistent across all interviews. The interviews are taken to be one-to-one dialogues with single sub­ jects. The limitations of this method in obtaining samples of everyday vernacular speech are well known but are not addressed, nor are issues relating to the possible effect the interviewer’s mere presence may have on the speech productions of individual language consultants. The differences in the problems addressed by Japanese and Western sociolinguistics may ultimately reduce to the basic difference between linguistic study in Japan and in the United States. That is, Japanese linguists of all schools exhibit little concern for the procedures by which units, both linguistic and social, may be identified objectively. There has been little need for this concern since, unlike most American linguists in the early years of the twentieth century, Japanese linguists have not faced any of the problems inherent in dealing with alien languages and have had unquestioned confidence in the analytic pro­ cedures they chose for work on their native tongue. Even scholars working in dialect studies have not questioned, as have American lin­ guists working with Black English vernacular, whether the dialect was or was not a form of Japanese; this has been taken for granted. Thus, where American and European sociolinguists spend considerable effort developing notions of speech community, discussing appropriate sam­ pling techniques, and worrying about whether they as outsiders can truly tap the everday vernacular speech of a given group of people, Japanese sociolinguists, considering themselves insiders on the basis of being fellow Japanese, have bypassed these concerns and proceeded directly to problems of what kinds of questions elicit the sorts of data being sought and how best to interpret the results of their investiga­ tions. This should not be taken, however, to mean that language-life

4*

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

scholars and sociolinguists in Japan do not share a great deal with Western sociolinguists. The very great degree to which there is overlap in interest is neatly summed up in Oishi (1977:235): In Japan, research on language life began around 1950. It is possible to view this research as being roughly equivalent to sociolinguistics, which arose in Amer­ ica some few years later. I believe it must be said that its domain and meth­ odology are not yet firmly established, but, broadly, it is probably fair to say that it is research on the problems of linguistic activity within the context of social life, or research on language from the aspect of social function, or re­ search on the relationship of language usage and social structure.

In the light of this definition, it is understandable that both re­ searchers in language life and sociolinguists would take an intense interest in women’s speech in Japan. Women’s roles and status in Ja­ panese society are in flux, as they are in all modern nations today, and it may be anticipated that insofar as language in any way reflects the relationship of individuals to their society and to other individuals within it, women’s speech in Japan is a rich field for delineating what sorts of changes in social roles have consequences for speech; what social-contextual factors influence speech productions; how speech functions to signal femininity, power, and the like; and how various linguistic forms relate to social structures.

Characteristics of Women’s Speech in Japan As an example of women’s speech in Japan today, Miller (1967) provides the following sample dialogue: Female version Ma, go-rippa na o-niwa de gozamasu wa ne. Shibafu ga hirobiro to shite ite, kekko de gozamasu wa ne. 'My what a splendid garden you have here— the lawn is so nice and big, it’s certainly wonderful, isn’t it!’ lie, nan desu ka, chitto mo teire ga yukitodokimasen mono de gozaimasu kara, mb nakanaka itsumo kirei ni shite oku wake ni wa marimasen no de gozamasu yo. ‘Oh no, not at all, we don’t take care of it at all any more, so it simply doesn’t look as nice as we would like it to.’ A, sai de gozaimasho ne. Kore dake o-hiroin de gozamasu kara, hitotori o-teire asobasu no ni datte taihen de gozaimasho ne. Demo ma, sore de mo itsumo yoku o-teire ga yukitodoite irasshaimasu wa. ftsumo honto ni o-kirei de kekko de gozamasu wa. ‘Oh, I don’t think so at all— but since it’s such a big garden, of course it must be quite a tremendous task to take care of it all by yourself; but even so, you certainly do manage to make it look nice all the time; it certainly is nice and pretty any time one sees it.’

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

45>

lie, chittomo sonna koto gozamasen wa. ‘No, I’m afraid not, not at all’ Male version Ii niwa da naa? ‘It’s a nice garden, isn’t it?’ Un. ‘Un.’

After listing a few of the differences commonly associated with female speech in Japanese, Miller concludes that the differences between men's and women's speech are too far-reaching and too closely interdependent upon content and style to admit of any simple summa­ ry. Put most briefly, women in Japanese society traditionally talk about differ­ ent things than men do, or at the very least, they say different things even when they talk about the same topics. (1969:289)

Jorden (1974) is somewhat more specific than Miller. She enumerates', these characteristics of women’s speech: special self-reference and ad­ dress terms, special sentence-ending particles and exclamations, a par­ ticular pitch range and set of intonations, frequent use of the honorific style, avoidance of kangofSino-Japanese lexical itemsJ7and~avoidance \pF"vulgar language. Repeated mention of all these characteristics is found in the literature;: The existence of special terms of self-reference and address, particularly the different sets of first- and second-person pronouns used by men and women, is one of the most frequently as­ serted sex-differentiated characteristics of Japanese'JJEndo, 1958; Ide 1979; Kumazawa 1954; Nagano 1955). Data-basea studies of pro­ nominal and address-term usage is treated in subsequent sections of this chapter; here, it is sufficient to introduce the claims made concern­ ing the relation between sex of speaker and the forms used. Ide cites pronouns as “the first factor to catch one’s eye” when seek­ ing sex-differentiated forms in Japanese (1979:37). Although there are numerous first- and second-person pronominal forms available to Ja­ panese speakers, they are not used with great frequency.1 Ide claims, moreover, that when they are used, at least as subjects, they are selected on the basis of the sex of the speaker and hearer and the formality of the situation and topic. , A) A TV' For both first and second person, there are pronominal forms used by both sexes (watakusi, watasi T ; anata, anta ‘you’) and forms used ’ “Japanese prefer to avoid direct pronominal reference, so that such words as watasi ‘I’ and especially anata ‘you’ are heard a good deal less often than their counterparts in English” (Martin 1975:322). Titles, names, and kin terms often replace pronouns; sub­ ject and object honorification also obviate the need for pronouns in Japanese sentences.

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

5°

exclusively by men or by women (boku , ore ’Im’; atakusi, atasi ‘If’; kim i, om ae, kisam a ‘youm’). Other forms exist, such as atai ‘I,’ used by small girls being babyish and hence coquettish and wasi ‘I,’ used in standard Japanese by men of approximately 50 years of age and older with intimates and addressees of lower status, but these are clearly much more restricted in use and are not considered by Ide, nor are they considered here. Clearly, the forms used exclusively by one sex or the other are a marker of sex of speaker; Ide notes, however, that even those forms used by speakers of both sexes are used differently by men and women; her claim is that the difference resides in the interpretation of events along the dimension of formality, with women consistently pro­ ducing speech that is more formal than that of men. Ide concludes that this differential use of pronouns, illustrated in Figures 2.1 and 2.2, stems from the fact that women are expected tube modest even where there is no difference in status among the participants in a conversa­ tion. It is appropriate, therefore, that they use more formal speech. Her argument seems, in the main, quite correct; she fails, however, to pro­ vide any more than anecdotal evidence in support of her assertions. A sample of her argumentation follows. Even when placed in situations of equal levels of formality, two individuals, responding to their relative statuses, use different first person pronouns. At a certain panel discussion, let us assume that although two men used the form watakusi, one other man used boku. It is clear that, in this situation, the man who used boku is of higher status than the two others. (Ide 1979:40)

_ , Degree of formality

Most formal Informal ^ ____________________________________________________________ 0 watakusi atakusi

Female speaker

______________________________________ watasi atasi watakusi watasi

Male speaker

boku ore

Figure 2.1

First-person singular pronouns and sex of speaker (from Ide 1979:39).

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

Degree of formality

51 Informal

Most formal

anata speaker

anta anata anta

Male speaker

kim i omae kisama* 1

Figure 2.2

Second-person singular pronouns and sex of speaker (from Ide 1979:43).

This form of descriptive enterprise is extremely common in the liter­ ature on Japanese female speech; the literature on special sentence­ ending particles and exclamations also contains many examples (Endo et al., 1958; Ide 1979; Iisawa 1956; Mio 1942, Miyaji 1957; Nagano 1955; Tanaka 1977). Tanaka, for instance, makes the following com­ ment about the sentence-ending particle yo,exemplified in (1) and (2): “The yo that men use has a falling intonation or ‘stress tone’; in con­ trast to this, there is a yo used by women, which has a slightly rising intonation. However, this always appears in combinatory forms such as wa yo, no yo, and koto y o ” (Tanaka 1977:443). (1) (2)

Boku, sono hon, yonda yo. ‘I read that book.’ Motto, yukkuri h an ase yo. ‘Read more slowly.’

As a statement of a general tendency, Tanaka’s observation is suffi­ ciently accurate. In fact, however, by failing to observe the use of yo by female speakers in naturalistic settings, or worse yet, by failing to de­ fine the speech context within which his statement is taken to be true, he has failed to capture the realities of informal female speech. In the present study, for example, yo is seen to be used frequently by women, is not invariably accompanied by other sentence-ending forms, and is rarely used with rising intonation. Even less concern for descriptive adequacy supported by quantified observational data collected across a range of speech contexts obtains

52

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

in a secondary set of characterizations claiming that Japanese female speech is correct (K. Kindaichi 1943; Miyaji 1957), repetitive (Endo et al. 1958; Mashimo 1969; Takahashi 1975), conservative (Mashimo 1969). soft (Endo et al. 1958; K. Kindaichi 1943; Link & Ishii 1923; Miyaji 1957), pure (Inoue 1943; Mashimo 1969), and elegant (Ekoyama 1943; Iisawa 1956; Inoue 1943). Jorden (1974) also mentions that female speech is considered less direct and precise2 and more emotional3 than male speech, noting that “all of [the above] charac­ teristics are supposed to be linguistically observable” (p. 104), but points out that “none of the studies I encountered included the exam­ ination of any significant amount of Japanese data in order to move from generalities about special features to a more precise statement of what actually does constitute female speech in Japanese today” (p. 107). Japanese linguists are by no means the only group of scholars to be criticized for failing to make more precise statements about the nature of female speech and language. Dubois and Crouch (1975) criticize the work of Robin Lakoff (1975) as failing to portray the speech of Ameri­ can women accurately due to an exclusive reliance on an introspective and asystematic methodology. This, they state, leads her to commit errors of fact and interpretation as well as to fail to isolate the specific variables that make female speech what it is. In a defense of Lakoff s work, Kitagawa raises the question of whether “so highly elusive a subject as women’s language in English can be expected to be controlled with the rigor exhibited . . . in Labov’s fa­ mous studies of linguistic variation in Martha’s Vineyard in New York City” (1977:275). The issue is not, Kitagawa claims, one of specifying precisely a set of variables that will completely characterize female speech but rather of characterizing fairly broadly the stereotype of female speech. Kitagawa does not suggest that this is a proper end point of the investigation of female speech but does claim for Lakoff, and hence for others who rely on introspective methodologies, that their findings may provide an effective frame of reference in terms of which features of female speech, in his case, the Japanese sentence-ending particle wa, may be explicated in principled manner. He does, howev­ er, perceive the necessity for more precision: “But there are languages in the world, such as Japanese, where the existence of woman’s lan­ 2See also Link (1923), Mio (1942), Inoue (1943), Ekoyama (1943), Iisawa (1956), Bunkach5 (1971). 3See also Link (1923), Inoue (1943), Amai and Nakamura (1955).

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

53

guage is indisputable. And some of Lakoff’s hypotheses may be testable with far more clarity in the context of these languages” (1977:276). It is, thus, particularly unfortunate in general that so few specific hypotheses concerning the nature of female Japanese speech have been formulated, much less tested. It is also unfortunate in the context of linguistic analyses of Japanese itself, since the distinction between male and female speech may be, for Japanese, second in sociolinguistic importance only to the distinction between adult and child speech. Higa (1976) classifies social constraints on Japanese in the following way. The first, and most basic, dichotomy is between terms that have different referential meaning: denkyuu Tight bulb’ and enpitu ‘pencil.’ This is not, however, a social constraint. The second break comes be­ tween forms used by children and those used by adults: o-meme versus me ‘eyes’ and an’yo versus asi Teg.’ Next comes the three-way differ­ entiation among forms used by children, those used by adult males, and those used by adult females: ponpon versus ha ra versus on aka ‘stomach.’ Higa contends that these basic categories are the most signif­ icant sources of sociolinguistically differentiated speech among Ja­ panese. Given the widespread recognition of the importance of sexrelated differences in speech, the scarcity of data-based studies is curious. However, not all characteristics attributed to Japanese female speech are unsupported by concrete data. Work has been done in the areas of phonology, the lexicon, terms of reference and address, sentence-final particles, and honorific language.

Phonology Sex-related differences noted in segmental phonology are [i] deletion and [r] assimilation. (3)

[i] deletion a. Ara, iya da wa. —» Ara, ya da wa. ‘Oh, I don’t like that.’ b. K ekkoo de gozaim asu. —> K ekkoo de gozaam asu. ‘That’s fine.’ c. Sayo de irassyaimasu ka? —» Sayo de rassyaimasu ka? ‘Is that so?’

In the form gozaimasu, [i] deletion is generally, though not always, accompanied by lengthening of the preceding [a]. Miller refers to these variant pronunciations as being restricted to specific forms (1967:289).

54

2. WOMEN'S SPEECH IN JAPAN

This is indeed the case, as there are many phonologically similar forms in which [i] deletion may not apply. (4)

a. Ara, iyasii! —> *Ara, yasii! ‘Oh, that’s gross!” b. Sara o araimasu. —> *Sara o araamasu. ‘(I) wash the dishes.’

[i] deletion in the forms -te/de iru and -te/de irassyaru is common in the speech of both men and women; it is restricted to female speech in the form gozaimasu. Thus, although this rule is frequently cited as charac­ teristic of female speech (Mashimo 1969; Miller 1967; Peng 1977), a comprehensive study has yet to be made of its relative frequency of application in cases where it applies in both male and female speech or of the additional forms to which it may apply in female speech. (5)

[r] assimilation a. Wakarcmai. —> Wakannai. ‘(I) don’t understand.’ b. Wakaru no. —» Wakanno. (I) understand.’ c. Soo ka m o sirenai. —» Soo ka mo sinnai. ‘That may be so.’

This phenomenon actually involves both [r] and the following vowel; in syllables consisting of [r] + V occurring before a nasal, the vowel is deleted and the [r] assimilated to the following nasal. Although both men’s and women’s speech exhibit this phenomenon, it has been sug­ gested that women may apply this rule with more frequency than men (Peng 1977). A final suggestion, following from the notion that women’s speech is more emotional than men’s (see below for other linguistic correlates of this), is that lengthening of both vowels and consonants may be more common in female than male speech (Gengo Seikatsu 1973). As one reviewer notes, this lengthening does not merely make a short vowel (or consonant) as long as a phonemically long vowel; rather, the vowel, can be prolonged to arbitrary lengths and involves a deviation from the usual mora-timed rhythm of Japanese. (6)

a. Sugoku kaw aii. —> Sugoo(:)ku kaw aii. ‘(It)’s very cute.’ b. Totem o tanosikatta. —» Tott(:)emo tanosikatta. ‘(It) was lots of fun.’

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

55

Suprasegmental phenomena associated with female speech are high pitch, a greater range of pitch relative to male speech [Mashimo 1969), and more extensive use of contrastive pitch—stress patterns (Chikamatsu 1979; Mashimo 1969). Associated with the latter is the larger propor­ tion of sentences with rising intonation in female speech: 84% in female speech, 67% in male speech (Gengo Seikatsu 1973). All of these characteristics are considered to be expressions of the greater emo­ tionalism of female speech. The Lexicon The entry on female speech in Kokugogaku Jiten (1969) categorizes the distinctive features of female speech into four groups: phonologi­ cal, lexical, syntactic, and discourse features. The lexical charac­ teristics listed are (1) the use of distinctively female forms and (2) the avoidance of k a ngo, forms characterized as hard and hence, un­ feminine by Japanese. In addition, we may note the sex-differentiated use of special pronominal forms and forms of reference and address. There are numerous forms, such as hara versus onaka (cited above), for which men and women use entirely different terms,4 for example, Male form tukemono mizu umai or oisii kuu or taberu

Female form okookoo ohiya oisii taberu

‘pickles’ ‘water’ ‘delicious’ ‘eat’

It should be noted that while male speakers may often use the female forms, female speakers are less able to use the male forms. In addition to these forms, there are others, perhaps more numerous, to which women either always, or more often than men, attach the honorific prefixes o-, go-, or omi- (Mashimo 1969; Nomoto 1978; Shibata 1957). Male form bentoo kane hasi hon

Female form obentoo okane ohasi gohon

‘box lunch’ ‘money’ ‘chopsticks’ ‘book’

Men and women also use different exclamatory words (Chikamatsu 1979; Jorden 1974). 4Certain of these are forms retained by female speakers from nyobo-kotoba.

56

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

Men’s forms: hoo, oi, naa, yai, kuso. Women’s forms: ara, maa, tyoito. Women are said to avoid kango (Gengo Seikatsu 1973; Kokugogaku Jiten 1969; Mashimo 1969). Nomoto (1978) reports the proportions of kango used in interviews with men and women. The female inter­ viewees employed kango 10.6% of the time, the male interviewees 13.7% of the time. Larger differences are observed in interviews con­ ducted by Tsuchiya (cited in Nomoto 1978:137). Tsuchiya taped con­ versations with men and women in formal and informal situations; proportions of kango used were calculated for each. The results are displayed in Table 2.2. A possible explanation of this phemenon is that a large proportion of kango are specialized terms, and relatively few women have the specialized knowledge that would athorize use of the terms. These figures are particularly interesting in light of the opinion commonly voiced by native speakers that sex-differentiated language and language use is restricted to informal contexts. Pronouns As noted above, there are clear sex-related differences in the use of personal pronouns in Japanese. Exclusively male first person singular pronouns are boku, ore, wasi, w agahai; exclusively female first person singular pronouns are atakusi, atasi, atai. In addition, there are two first person singular pronouns used by both male and female speakers, watakusi and watasi; they are adopted particularly in formal contexts, where sex-related differences are purported to disappear (although see figures for use of kango in formal contexts in Table 2.2). Although there are second person pronouns (kimi, kisama, temee) used for exclusively by male speakers there are none used exclusively by female speakers. Anata, omae are used by both sexes, albeit some­ what differently. In conversations between husband and wife, for ex­ ample, the wife uses anata to address her spouse, whereas he uses om ae to address her. Anata is a more polite form than omae, and this usage is thought to reflect the unequal relationship between spouses. Anata is used by men toward persons other than spouses, however, indicating some social distance but not necessarily inequality of status, and om ae may be used by older women to address children and pets. This latter usage is very restricted. Other sex-related differences in the form and use of personal pro­ nouns have been described earlier. Although these differences are well known and it is commonly agreed that features in the speech context influence male and female speakers in different ways, it is unclear just

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

57

Table 2.2 PERCENTAGES OF KANGO USED IN FORMAL AND INFORMAL CONTEXTS

Formal Informal

Male

Female

22.5 12.0

15.5 12.0

what the significant contextual features are and how they combine— or, indeed, if they do— to produce sex-differentiated behavior (utterances) sufficiently regular in patterning to be amenable to quantification. In fact, very few field studies of pronominal use among adult speakers are available. One exception is Peng (1973), in which first and second personal pronoun use among junior high school students— not quite adult speakers, but relatively close— is investigated. His results show clearcut differences in use across sex, for both first and second person pro­ nouns (see Table 2.3). The most striking difference, however, is not in the use of the various forms themselves, nor in the somewhat unex­ pected appearance of kimi ‘you’ among female speakers, but rather in the very marked tendency of female speakers to avoid second person pronouns entirely (66.3% vs. 39.5%), a phenomenon that is not to my knowledge reported in the literature of language and sex at all. This, of course, merely serves to highlight the need for careful observational studies in this area. Table 2.3 PERCENTAGES OF SELF-REPORTED PRONOUN USE BY JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS0 Female

Male First person

boku ore boku/ore avoidance

51.7% 21.8% 20.3% 4.0%

watasi atasi watak usi avoidance

57.8% 32.5% 6.1% 3.7%

Second person

avoidance kimi omae kimi/omae anata

39.5% 25.8% 17.1% 8.5% 2.8%

avoidance anata kimi onto

66.3% 23.5% 5.5% 2.5%

'From Peng (1973).

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

5* -Address Terms.

Lee (1976) interviewed Japanese couples residing in the United States to elicit common terms of address and reference for spouses. She reported the following terms of address used between husband and wife, listed in descending order of frequency. Husband —» wife first name kimi, omae okaasan ‘mother’ mama

Wife —* husband first name + san otoosan ‘father’ papa anata

Her study too, however, is flawed by lack of attention to the collection of supportive performance data; she has relied exclusively upon the self-report of native speakers who were, morever, residing outside Ja­ pan at the time. She did not delineate the contexts in which these terms were used, nor indicate whether informants exhibited variability in choice of terms across various situations. Watanabe (1963), however, supports one of Lee’s findings, reporting a much greater use of otoosan or papa by women (47%) than of okaasan or mama by men (29%), although he, too, fails to address the issue of potential contextually controlled variation. Morphology and Syntax Virtually all of the literature on sex-related morphological and syn­ tactic differences in Japanese focuses on the end of the sentence, where these differences are most apparent (Chikamatsu 1979:2). Men and women are said to use different types of predicates: Men tend to use verbs, whereas women tend to usoadjectives (Hatano 1954). This claim is examined in Chapter 4. Other factors at the ends of seritences con­ strained by sex of speaker are choice of verb ending (this refers pri­ marily to level of politeness) and choice of sentence-final particles. Koizumi (1978) suggests why sex-related differences should appear in this position in the following passage: Tookai tihoo ni zisin ga okoru rasii ne. In this sentence, zisin ga okoru is an objective statement. However, the auxiliary verb rasii that follows it indicates the speaker’s attitude toward that statement, and the final ne is a particle expressing the speaker’s solidarity with the listener. Now, if we were to devise a structure labeled “the speaker communicating a message to the listener,” that structure would be the objective statement, the judgment of the speaker toward the message would be the auxiliary, and the attitude of the speaker toward the listener would be expressed by the particle. It appears that particles, which

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

55

express speaker—hearer relationships, and auxiliaries largely account for the nonsubjective parts of the utterances. This is a grammatical means of reflecting status, solidarity, and in addition to these, sex differences. (1978:48)

Choice o f Verb Endings. Japanese sentences are verb (or adjective or copula) final, and verb endings in Japanese are divided into plain (da-tai) (7a, 7c) and polite (desu-tai) (7b, 7d) forms. (7)

a. kirei da b. kirei desu ‘(It) is pretty.’ c. hon o yom u d. hon o yom im asu ‘(I) read books.’

The preponderance of men’s utterances clearly fall into one or the other of these categories. In contrast to this, many women’s utterances can readily be placed in neither of these. A measure of how strongly this feature is associated with female speech patterns is reported in Jugaku (1979). In an analysis of the verb endings of 1226 sentences taken from two weekly news magazines (617 sentences) and one weekly women’s magazine (609 sentences), sub­ stantial differences were found between the magazines directed toward a general audience and the one directed toward an exclusively female audience in the percentages of sentences ending in either the plain or polite sentence-final verb forms of (7). The prose written for female readers contained more than 20% fewer sentences of this type (52.1% vs. 76.2%). The women’s magazine had, instead, relatively large num­ bers of sentences ending in continuative forms such as tirikakatte in (8) or sentences ending with noun phrases or other nonverbal elements such as the noun phrase messeezi o in (9). (8)

H anabira ga harahara to tirikakatte. . . . ‘The petals began to flutter down to the ground . . .’

(9)

Ano yo kara messeezi o. . . . ‘From that world, a message . . .’

A summary of the percentages for each type of ending is provided in Table 2.4. The remaining sentences ended in nouns without particles; these occurred in approximately equal numbers in all the magazines investigated. Jugaku presents no information concerning the kinds of articles in

6o

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

Table 2.4 PERCENTAGE OF VERB ENDING TYPES IN WEEKLY MAGAZINES"

Magazine General news weekly Women’s weekly

Standard endings

Continuative verb endings

Other

76.2

1.3

1.9

52.1

7.4

18.1

“Adapted from Jugaku (1979).

which these various sentence types are found, nor any indication of the position of the sentences with nonstandard endings within the nar­ rative; her figures do represent, however, a very striking picture of perceived differences in narrative form across sex, which, insofar as it exists on the level of conscious awareness and is sufficiently strong to be available for manipulation by the male editors of women’s maga­ zines, may be considered to have achieved the status of a stereotype (Labov 1972], The degree to which it is an accurate stereotype has yet to be investigated in a systematic analysis of female speech samples col­ lected in a variety of speech situations; this sort of analysis is necessary to determine whether the stereotype has any validity, whether sex is the only sociocultural variable influencing the production of nonstan­ dard verb endings, and, if sex does not operate on sentences in this way in all speech contexts, what other speaker and contextual variables interact with it to produce these forms. The evidence is, however, most suggestive and offers a rich field for future investigation. Other studies that claim sex differences in choice of verb endings take a slightly different tack, claiming that the large numbers of sen­ tences in female speech that can be placed neither into the plain verb category nor the polite are due to the proliferation of honorific ex­ pressions and sentence-final particles (Bunkacho 1975:166). Thus, where a male speaker would use hon o yom im asu, a female speaker would use hon o yomu w a.5 Of the two copular forms da andjiesu, women use the latter almost exclusively when there is no sentencefinal particle. When da is used, it is invariably followed by a particle, which is optional in male speech. 5Hon o yomu wa is unambiguously in the plain form; the character of this form is, however, somewhat closer to a polite form than is the equivalent string with the sen­ tence-final particle wa omitted. In women’s speech, cases where it is difficult to dis­ tinguish da-forms and desu-forms are numerous. It is believed that this is because these forms are being changed in character by the rich use of sentence-final particles and honorifics. Viewed from the level of politeness, instances in which the woman’s speech da-form is equivalent to the men’s speech desu-form abound (Bunkacho 1975:166).

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

(10 )

6l

(M) Sizuka da. ‘It is quiet.’ (F) Sizuka da wa. ‘It is quiet.’

The da form is, moreover, frequently deleted by women and other sentence-final particles used. (1 1 )

(F) Sizuka nee. ‘It is quiet.’

The National Language Research Institute (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo) study of honorific language in Okazaki-shi, Aichi Prefecture tested the proposition that women’s speech is more polite than men’s (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo 1957). Twelve situations were con­ structed and each informant was asked how she or he would respond. The answers were partitioned into three groups and scored: normally polite (0), polite ( + 1), rude (-1 ). Each informant’s score was averaged over the 12 situations, and these mean scores were averaged across all women and all men. The final scores were significantly different: 0.27 for men and 2.90 for women. This is the strongest support available for the claim that women’s speech is more polite than men’s. Sentence-Final Particles Skrnie sentence-final particles may be used exclusively by women, others exclusively by men, and a third category may be used by both men and women but with different verb and particle forms. The follow­ ing examples are from Chikamatsu (1979). (12 )

Particles used by women wa Sore de ii wa. ‘That’s enough.’ Ame ga hutte kita wa yo. ‘It has started raining.’ Hontoo ni yokatta wa nee. ‘That was really good.’ no Nani mo itadakitaku nai no. ‘I don’t want to eat anything.’ Sonna ni sinpai sinakute mo ii no yo. ‘You don’t need to worry so much.’ Yappari soo datta no ne. ‘So, it was like that.’ te Tookyoo ni irasita koto atte? (Question) ‘Have you ever been to Tokyo?’

bl

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

Otya o sasiagete. (Command) ‘Give (them) tea.” (13)

Particles used by men ze Ore wa moo iku ze. (Emphatic) ‘I’m going.’ zo Koitu wa umai zo. (Emphatic) ‘That is good.’ na Zuibun atui na. (Elicit agreement) ‘It’s really hot, isn’t it.’ Kuru na. (Negative command) ‘Don’t come.’

Particles used by both men and women are yo and ne. Whereas men use these forms directly after plain and polite forms of the copula, adjectives, and verbs, women are limited to the following combinations of forms; (14)

V + 1fno 1 + (yo) (ne) 1Iwa J N + jf (na)no(yoj(ne) 1 ' (yojfne) i

Some examples are given in (15)—(18). (15)

(M) Iku yo. (F) Iku wa yo. ‘I’m going.’

(16)

(M) Hatizi da yo. (F) Hatizi yo. ‘It’s eight o’clock.’

(17)

(M) Ikim asu ne. (F) Ikim asu no ne. ‘I’m going.’

(18)

(M) Dame ne. (F) Dame na no yo ne. ‘You mustn’t do that.’

The studies (Takahara 1979; also reported in Hori 1979, Peng 1981) investigate the frequency of occurrence of the various sentence-final particles. Takahara, whose subjects range from elementary school stu­ dents through 40-year old housewives, states that female speakers tend to produce more sentence-final particles than do male speakers but is not specific as to which particles— or, indeed, which female speak-

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

63

Table 2.5 PERCENTAGE OF SENTENCE-FINAL PARTICLES PRODUCED BY SCHOOLCHILDREN Sex of speaker

No particle

Neutral

Feminine

Masculine

Male Female

50.6 38.5

5.5 16.4

18.1 26.5

25.8 18.6

ers— are involved in the formulation of this remark. Hori’s research is an analysis of the informal speech of groups (of the same sex but un­ equal in number of participants) of elementary and middle school chil­ dren; her results are summarized in Table 2.5. Insofar as evidence from children and adolescents can be used in support of claims about the language of adults, these figures support Takahara’s claim that female speakers prodime more sentence-final particles than male speakers while at the same time raising some interesting additional questions, Why, for example, should girls use so many more neutral particles than boys? How do the sentences with no sentence-final particle end? And finally, since Hori adopts without criticism Tanaka’s classification of the particles into masculine, feminine, and neutral categories (Tanaka 1977), how justified is she in imposing these categories upon the speech productions of her subjects? Might it not have been a more valid procedure to work from the actual utterances toward an appropriate typing of the particles, particularly in light of the relatively small dif­ ferences found in the frequencies of the feminine and masculine parti­ cles as opposed to the very large differences seen in the neutral catego­ ry? Clearly, more empirical investigation is required in support of the claims made regarding sentence-final particles .*6 Thus, only a few of the characteristics of female speech listed above are supported by other than anecdotal data. Women’s speech does have a characteristic pitch range, a rich set of intonation contours, and vari6Ide (1979, reported in Peng 1981) also discusses particles found in samples of the informal speech of college students and does so in such a way that some sense of the relative frequency of use by male and female speakers of each form is conveyed. Ide’s findings confirm much of what has been said about sentence-final particles and sex of speaker: male speakers were, in fact, responsible for most of the productions of yo na (100%), ze (100%), zo (94.4%), na (90.2%), saa (86.2%); female speakers for wa yo (100%), na no ne (100%), wa ne (100%), no yo (97.2%), wa (88.9%), na no (85.7%), and no? (72.5%). Yo, yo ne, and ne, typically considered masculine forms, are used almost equally by both sexes, 66.5%, 50%, and 48.2% respectively, of these forms being pro­ duced by male speakers. These results clearly indicate that the role of yo, at least, needs to be reevaluated in relation to sex of speaker.

t>4

2. WOMEN’S SPEECH IN JAPAN

15

ant forms for one or two vowels, ft is more polite than men’s speech; it is softer, at least insofar as softness can by conveyed by the avoidance of Sino—Japanese lexical items and the use of characteristic sentence­ ending particles that indicate reserve or interest in eliciting the lis­ tener’s opinion (wa, ne, nee) as opposed to emphatic assertion (yo, ze, zo). Research has yet to be done, however, to investigate the claims that women’s speech is (1 ) repetitive (that is, women are verbose but have a restricted vocabulary; therefore, they use the same words more often than men and are more repetitive),7 (2) concrete, (3) conservative, and (4) syntactically loose. In fact, the large number of publications on women’s speech, as well as the relatively small number on men’s speech, have not been able to address the issue of precisely how, or even whether, the sociocultural variable sex should be incorporated into a grammar of Japanese.

Women’s Speech: Contradictory Claims The present study is intended as a first step toward addressing this issue. 1 have taken as my starting point the following apparently inher­ ently contradictory claims made for women’s speech in Japanese. 7Kawamata (1975) reports on the speech of a housewife whose total verbal productions over a 24-hour period were tape recorded. She comments on the repetitive nature of female speech, citing the following example recorded in under one minute. Hai, Kaoru, roku-zi. Ii ka? Razio kiku no? OK six o’clock OK Int radio listen Int ‘Okay, Kaoru, it’s six o ’clock. Okay? Are you going to listen to the radio?’ Nee-tyan, roku-zi. Kyoo wa hayaku iku hi dakara . . . . older sister six o’clock today Top early go day so ‘Sis, it’s six o’clock. Today’s a day you go early, so . . . .’ Are, are, my goodness my goodness ‘My goodness, this person . . . Kyoo wa tukeppanasi today Top turned-and-left-on ‘You’re not leaving (the radio) Ii ka, okinasai yo. OK Int get up ‘Okay? Get up.’

kono hito wa . . . . floku-zi. this person Top six o’clock ! It’s six o’clock.’ zya nai desyoo ne. Yosi. is not TQ all right turned on all day today, are you? All right.’

Papa-san, roku-zi. father six o’clock ‘Dad, it’s six o’clock.’ The degree to which this repetitiveness is due to the sex of speaker, however, is prob­ lematic; even if it were the papa-san performing the task of waking the family, the utterances would look much the same.

s

WOMEN’S SPEECH: CONTRADICTORY CLAIMS

65

y WOMEN’S SPEECH IS CONSERVATIVE. \This statement addresses two as­ pects of female speech. First, women Ho not create as many new lexical items, particularly what ma^ be termed ryukogo ‘popular, slang words’ as men, nor do they use them as frequently once they have been created (Mashimo 1969). Secpnd, women are in some way the standard bearers of the language, preserving its older, cultured, more “correct” forms. This claim was made by Jesperson (1922) and espoused by a number of Japanese writers (Ekoyama 1943; Inoue 1943; K. Kindaichi 1943; Mash­ imo 1969; Miyaji 1957). What is the general attitude of the two sexes to those changes that are con­ stantly going on in languages? Can they be ascribed exclusively or predomi­ nantly to one of the sexes? Or do both equally participate in them? An answer that is very often given is that as a rule women are more conservative than men, and that they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due to the intiative of men (Jespersen 1922:242).

Interestingly, a similar claim is made by Ross (1978), although for en­ tirely different reasons. As one aspect of his study of MYOPIA, Ross has proposed the following canonical forms for English: Canonical speaker: adult, white, male Canonical sentence: agentive subject-transitive verb (not followed by prepositions or particles)—nonsentential object He has hypothesized that the closer a given speaker is to being a canonical speaker, the freer he or she is to choose not to produce a canonical sentence. This might be extended to other levels as well, thus providing an explanation for men’s supposed proclivity for developing new words, or for using previously existing forms, alone or in combina­ tion, in new extended meanings. Women, on the other hand, would be more constrained to restrict their speech to utterances approximating the canonical sentence in form and to restrict their use of lexical items to literal rather than figurative meanings. Although Ross’ hypotheses were developed for English, the reasons underlying them seem applicable to the Japanese case as well, and provide a rationale for the comments made not only by Jespersen, but by a number of Japanese linguists regarding the typically conservative, correct form of female speech. WOMEN'S SPEECH IS SYNTACTICALLY LOOSE. In direct contradiction to the first claim, this states that sentences uttered by women are, more often than those uttered by men, incomplete, run on, or missing key

66

2.

WOMEN'S SPEECH IN JAPAN

elements that would lend clarity and explicitness .8 Women are noted by Mashimo to have a higher percentage of utterances in which the sentence-final verb endings and other elements are missing “because men speak about logical factual subjects, while women’s speech is emotional, expressive” (1969:59—60). Kokugogaku Jiten (1969) cites word order as one of the four major categories of difference between male and female Japanese; any difference in word order would, of course, inevitably lead to movement toward or away from a canonical sentence form. A survey conducted by Oishi (1957) showed that wom­ en felt their mothers’ utterances were long, indirect, lacking in focus, and illogical. They reported feeling that their own speech exhibited these characteristics as well, in contrast to the speech of men. Many other authors have made similar observations, characterizing female Japanese as loose, diffuse, vague, and unclear (Gengo Seikatsu 1957, 1973; Mashimo 1969). Thus, we have on one hand the statement that women are con­ strained to produce utterances relatively closer to a canonical sentence form than men, and on the other hand statements leading us to expect that they produce utterances more distant from the canonical form. It is unlikely that both claims are correct. In this study, I have tested the fornwh male and female speech to determine which set of claims is correctjlt is assumed that the can­ onical speaker of Japanese is Japanese (both in terms of citizenship and ethnic identity), adult, and male. The Japanese canonical sentence is discussed in Chapter 5. ^ The relationship of a given utterance to a canonical-sentence form can be viewefLin a number of different ways. One may ask a series of questions. First, are women’s utterances typically longer, shorter, or similar in length to the canonical sentence? What is their relationship in terms of length to men’s utterances? Second, what types of elements are present (e.g., nouns, adverbs, verbs) and what are their grammatical functions (e.g., subject, direct object)? Internal noun phrase or adver­ bial phrase structure is not considered here. Third, are there systematic differences in the order in which these elements occur in utterances? And finally, what is the relation between (surface) grammatical func8On a more positive note, Labov (1 9 72:301-313) points to the role women play as leaders in language change, at least once change is initiated. It must be noted, however, that when women were found to move faster in a change in progress than men, the change was in the direction of a standard prestige form. Japanese linguists who claim that women’s speech is vague, diffuse, and loose are in essence saying that women move farther, if not faster, away from the prestige form.

WOMEN’S SPEECH: CONTRADICTORY CLAIMS

67

tion and case? This last requires a different set of analytical techniques and is set aside for future study. v' ^ f % The present study began as an attempt to locate portions of the gram­ mar of Japanese that exhibit sex-related variability. It also represented an initial attempt to provide information about which aspects of the grammar are particularly susceptible to the influence of social vari­ ables; these rules may then be tested for variability in application in a variety of speech situations in order to determine which sociocultural categories affect language use in Japan. Japanese sociolinguists have developed many specialized topics extensively but are still groping for the sociocultural units most pertinent to language variation studies in general. The data collected for this study were also examined for conformity to norms established for certain aspects of Japanese linguistic behavior without reference to sex of speaker: predicate type, ellipsis of nominal and adverbial phrases and case markers, and surface word order.

3.

‘■Jh e ‘Pield Situation: ‘Data Collection and Analytical

Data Collection Site The site of the present study was Mitaka, an incorporated city of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area lying on the western boundary of the core 23ward area of the city. It covers an area 16.83 km2, has a population of 165,000 (1979), and is directly connected to the inner city by the Chuosen, a major intraurban commuter train line. Mitaka was incorporated into the Tokyo Metropolitan Area in 1893 but was only in the twentieth century transformed from a fairly independent rural community into the middle- to upper-middle-class, primarily residential suburb for commuters to the inner city that it is today. In 1974 the average per capita income was 1.64 times the national average. The majority of households were headed by white-collar workers. Although the choice of Mitaka as the site for this study was based primarily on its identity as a standard Japanese-speaking area, it is also the case that the Japanese suburbs are of increasing importance. Japan's growing suburbs are also important socially, owing to the charac­ teristics of their residents. During the past quarter-century, Japan has witnessed a major alteration in her occupational structure. In the face of rapid indus­ trialization, the farm population declined while white-collar groups mush­ roomed. Having been a society where most workers were agricultural pro­ prietors or unpaid family laborers, Japan became in a few decades a nation of company employees. The epitome of this new social type is the stereotypic

DATA COLLECTION

Go,

middle-class, white-collar worker— the sarariiman, or salary man. Of equal importance is his counterpart, the middle-class, blue-collar worker employed on the production line of a large corporation. Symbolizing the changing char­ acter of Japanese society, men from such groups, and their families, are those who have settled in the largest numbers in the nation’s suburbs during the postwar era. They represent the dominant social thrust in contemporary Japan, and they personify the future character of Japanese society as well. (Allinson 1979:6)

As Allinson notes, these suburbs, not only around Tokyo, but around other major urban centers such as Kyoto and Osaka as well, emerged in the early 1920s. They remained small, basically rural communities, however, until after World War II, when population pressures on the urban centers and skyrocketing land prices forced families to look ever farther away from their place of employment for housing. Beginning in the 1950s, these families moved into the suburban areas so that today they are diversified communities of one to three hundred thousand. They are characterized by political autonomy from, but economic de­ pendence on, the urban entities to which they are adjacent; by being residential communities for commuters to the central city; and by pop­ ulation densities that fall between those of the city and rural commu­ nities beyond1 (Allinson 1979:4). In Mitaka as well as in the surround­ ing suburban cities, this population is composed primarily of middleclass white collar workers and their families. Although it was not required for this study that all participants be native to Mitaka, only long-term residents and residents who had moved into Mitaka from other non-shitamachi2 areas of Tokyo were included. Thus, it was possible to utilize the data collected without considering the possibility of differences due to dialect interference. That all subjects did speak standard Japanese was verified by replaying the taped interviews (see below) to three additional informants, all native speakers of standard Japanese, for their judgments. In addition, at the time of this study, I was a resident of Mitaka and as such had access to community facilities, friendship networks, and the means of making contact with potential subjects in a natural fashion. ’ The 1975 populations of the two neighboring wards Setagaya and Suginami were 13701.5/km2 and 16717.8/km2, respectively. Those of the cities beyond Mitaka to the west were 8073.6/km2 (Chofu) and 904 9 .7/km2 (Koganei). Mitaka’s population density was 9801.0/km2 in the same year.

2Shitamachi refers to the area in Tokyo covering Dato, Chiyoda, Chtio, and Minato wards, a downtown area characterized by large numbers of blue-collar and merchant residents.

7 o

3. THE FIELD SITUATION

Subjects A complete study of sex-differentiated language use would include data on language used by men and women across a broad range of ages, socioeconomic classes, and professions. This study is, however, re­ stricted to middle-class (female) housewives and (male) white-collar workers. The term “middle class” has not been well defined in Japan. I use the following criteria for this study: (1 ) 12 or more years of educa­ tion, (2) an annual household income of 2—10 million yen, and (3) identification of head of household as a white-collar worker. It will be possible in the future to use the results of this study as a measure against which the language use of men and women from other classes and professions may be matched. An original pool of nine female and nine male subjects was selected for interviewing by the investigator. These subjects were divided into three subgroups by age; three subjects each fell into the ranges 20-29, 30-39, and 40-49. No subjects under 20 were included, since the ob­ ject of this investigation was the language use of housewives and whitecollar workers. Neither were any subjects 50 and over included. The reasons for this were twofold. First, for those who married and had children in their twenties, the majority in the case of women, the fifties are the years in which they may expect their children to marry. Many families become stem families at this point, in which case it is prob­ lematic just which wife is the housewife, there being only one per household. Whether this does, in fact, affect linguistic usage is ques­ tionable, but it seemed desirable to exclude any such possible extra­ neous influences insofar as possible. The second reason, the pattern of early retirement prevalent in Japan, applies primarily to the male sub­ jects. Although the mandatory retirement age is being extended into the sixties in some firms, it still falls in the mid- to late fifties in many others. Thus, many men in their fifties cease to be white-collar workers; those who are excluded from mandatory retirement are an elite group who fall outside the scope of this study. Each subject selected was asked to invite two close friends from the same age group to join him or her at the interview. No further specifica­ tion was made as to the linguistic background (i.e., that they be native speakers of standard Japanese) or professional status of the friends. From the enlarged pool of 27 female and 27 male subjects interviewed, the 30 who best met the above-mentioned requirements were chosen. The final pool of subjects consisted of five male and five female subjects each in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They had been residents of Mitaka an average of 16.5 years (M = 18.5, F = 14.4) and

DATA COLLECTION

7*

were all white-collar workers or, with one exception, the wives of white-collar workers. The husband of one female interviewee was em­ ployed in a service industry; both her educational level and his were equivalent to that of the other interviewees, as were their geographic origins, family income level, and other characteristics. Male subjects averaged 1.1 more years of education than female subjects (14.9 vs. 13.8), although the youngest groups (20-29) had precisely the same level of education, averaging 13.6 years with three high school and two college graduates in each group. Annual income for each subject (household) ranged from 2 to 10 million yen. Most subjects had one to two children (average 1.45), although some of the younger subjects had none. Four male and five female subjects lived in danchi (public hous­ ing apartment complexes) or company provided housing, three male and seven female subjects in apartments or manshon, eight male and three female subjects in single-unit dwellings. Table 3.1 summarizes subjects’ biographical information by age group. It should be remembered that we are primarily interested in describing “everyday” speech, that is, the kind of speech which is, from the partici­ pants’ point of view, least marked for special features, whether linguistic or social. (Sankoff 1974:24)

In order to obtain sufficiently large samples of “everyday” speech as described above, the interviews were arranged so as to minimize ob­ server effect (Labov 1972). A series of test interviews was conducted with female subjects to determine the optimum setting for eliciting natural, informal speech. The following test interviews were conducted and recorded. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

One subject, investigator present, topic free Two subjects, investigator present, topic free Two subjects, investigator present, topic set Three subjects, investigator present, topic free Three subjects, investigator present, topic free Four subjects, investigator present, topic free Two subjects, investigator not present, topic set

It was immediately apparent that when the investigator was not pre­ sent, the tape recorder overwhelmed all subjects, so that virtually no speech could be recorded. Trials with the investigator not present were therefore stopped after one session. When the investigator and one subject were present, the use of honorific language directed toward the investigator inhibited informal conversation; this was to a lesser degree

c

o

•

CM

§

T—