日本語とジェンダー第10号（2010）【日本語ジェンダー学会ウェスタン・ミシガン大学研究例会発表要旨】

Stylistic Differences dealt in Teaching Japanese

立松喜久子

I used to teach at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies administered by Stanford
University. It is a one year intensive course for American and Canadian graduate students who are majoring inJapanese history, literature, religion, art, business, politics and various fields concerning Japanology.
I taught grammar of classical literature of Japanese and history as well as Japanese in general, including
listening and reading comprehension. I also taught formal expressions including honorific and polite expressions sothat the students wouldn't be thought to be "inappropriate ", "impolite" or "rude" in the future when they mingle
with the educated, sophisticated (if there are any) Japanese people.
They must behave and talk like Japanese, they must be accepted by the Japanese so that they are valued
positively. Of course, many dialects and different vocabularies and pronunciations exist in Japanese, though I value
highly the varieties of the Japanese language, there are received pronunciations and vocabularies for formal
situations which are acceptable by most Japanese people.
As for informal conversations it rarely matters if they make mistakes or if they speak too politely, I presume.
Think about the case of English. When you meet the dean at the university for the first time you may say "How do
you do , sir" instead of saying "Nice to meet you". So we haven't taught informal expressions except when they
appeared in the dramas and literature. We taught them how to comprehend slang and vulgar words only atcomprehension classes.
Of course there were some students who said that they had been criticized by their Japanese friends saying
the students were too polite and gave the impression of being cold. However, I thought that they must be encouraged
to use the socially relevant variety of Japanese. The norms are not static and the politeness in Japanese has been
decreasing drastically in these 40 years, though.
There are many well -informed people who deplore saying that the Japanese Language is being debased inthese days. The evidence is :the omission of "ra" of the potential form .e.g. instead of "taberareru" they say"tabereru". These phenomena appeared for the first time about 40 years ago, but it is now considered a correct
inflection. I think it owes to the Osaka dialect which prevails now and is very popular among young people of Kantoarea.
In Japan the big change in the usage of Japanese has occurred since the 1970s, the time when the student
movements were rampant. They were:73
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日本語とジェンダー第10号（2010）

1) the difference between men's speech and that of women's was drastically reduced and2) the politeness in the language also decreased.
On the other hand, excessively polite expressions are heard at department stores and so on because themanuals for salesclerks to speak to the customers are thought to be polite, but the person who wrote the manual
didn't know the correct usage of honorific expressions. I was surprised to have been asked my name, saying"onamaesama wa?" ("May I have your revered name, please?")As far as politeness is concerned, Japanese Language is going to two extremes. Very casual expressions andoverly polite expressions. Prof. Shimemura talked about the ending particle in which the difference between men
and women appears to decrease in casual speech. It is called "blurring " or "androgynous" phenomenon.
I too, recognized the disappearance of ending particle "dai, kai" from men's speech.
"Dai "is used with "wh " questions like daredai, dokodai, itudai, doredai, nandai, and "kai" is used in the questions
which anticipate yes or no answer, but these ending particles are seldom heard among the young people nowadays
in Tokyo area. However, they are heard among the dialects especially spoken by elderly people. Instead, young men
use "no" at the end of sentences like "ikuno""aruno". So if a young man say "ikukai" instead of "ikuno", it sounds
as if he is old before his time or, he seems to be speaking a dialect.
It's also important to pay attention to the intonation. Another ending particle "wa "varies according to thespeakers like "ikuwa" by women, (with rising intonation) or "ikuwa" by men (with falling intonation).
Depending on the situation, a word can have quite a different meaning. For example, "sensei" which meansa teacher, instructor, or professor, may be used pejoratively. I once heard a man say about one of his workers "Anosensei, nani yattenda!" ("What is he doing, that fellow!") Thus, an utterance reflects speaker's birth place, the place
where he or she was brought up, his or her social stratum, or feelings, to whom the utterance was spoken, he place
where the utterance was performed, etc.
Illiteracy is confined to a very few in Japan, (by the way, the rate of the students who go to the senior highschool exceeds 97% of the students who graduated from the junior high) and I could say that Japanese people arealmost unanimous in comprehending and speaking a common Japanese, (kyotsugo) not standard Japanese(hyojungo) though their pronunciation are quite bit different. Dialects are diminishing rapidly and are excluded
from business society, academic society , and politeness society. Dialect is thought to be non-standard and canconnote various degrees of inferiority. On the other hand, the dialects are occasionally highly estimated and areused effectively in the drama or etc.
Of course, the diminishing of the difference between men and women' speech owes to the thought that both
men and women are equal, however, Prof. Takeshi Shibata dislikes the idea that it was affected by the feminist
movement. And Prof. Sachiko Ide (sociolinguist on women’s language) said the difference between men andwomen's speech is not the gender difference but it's ROLE DIFFERENCE. So, if one speaks in the commentary74
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日本語とジェンダー第10号（2010）

program in the TV, he or she speaks almost the same, there isn't any gender divide. Because the degree of politenessis almost the same, women don't speak too politely, and men don't speak too harshly.
However, there remains the fact that women are treated unfairly, and the language, as Professor Mizue Sasaki
pointed out, is spoken behind in the society, or thought in the people's bosom without saying it aloud.
Subconsciously these discriminations underlie both men and women.
Actually, the tardiness of the improvements on the women's promotion, raise of salary, participation in thesociety are obvious. These de facto gender discriminations must be reformed ASAP. As Robin Lakoff said,"Language uses us as much as we use language." Inequality exists in the language as well as in the reality.

(立松喜久子

前米加大学連合副所長、日本語ジェンダー学会評議員）

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Copyright © 2010 The Society for Gender Studies in Japanese All rights reserved.