Samira Angelie Dania Farias

Source #1

This collection of works was written and published in Japan by Christine Pearson Casanave and Amy D. Yamashiro with their assistant editor, Fumiko Kato. This was written for the purpose of collecting articles on gender issues in language education. To begin with, I learned in this source about the many gender issues Japanese education has, and how it is taught to people from a young age. Plus, it did make me advance in my understanding of the topic, and it interested me further. This source was also different than my other sources since it focused on language education with these gender differences. However, this source wasn't as clear since it's a collection of works, however, the table of contents made it easier to find things.

Source #2

This eBook was written and published in Berkeley, Calif. USA by Miyako Inoue. This eBook provides an entirely new critical perspective on the central importance of ideas about language in the reproduction of gender, class, and race divisions in modern Japan. It focuses on "women's language" and the history and social effects of this language form. Out of this, I learned a lot about where does the "women's language" comes from and why is it used and considered some sort of tradition. This reading made me advance my understanding of my topic and made my interest grow a lot more. Additionally, This source focuses on "women's language" but it adds this new perspective about how it is about the tradition rather than only about the gender specifically. Overall, this eBook was easy to follow, as the table of content was clear and so was the pages.

Source #3

This online article was written and published in Japan by Cameron Lombardo. This article was written to give a more queer-inclusive overview of gendered Japanese language use. As it looks at the stereotypically gendered language speech known as "women's language" and "men's language", and then dive deeper into how speakers deviate from these linguistic gender norms in real life. But it also aimed to give people a better understanding of gendered language options in Japanese, so we can make the choices that suit us best and our unique identity and communicative purposes. From this article, I did learn more about what exactly is gendered language and its use among Japanese people, and how it might not be around anymore since most young speakers of Japanese are sticking to gender-neutral forms instead. This reading definitely made me advance in my understanding of my topic and it increased my interest a lot. In the end, this source is very similar to my others, but it focused a little bit more on its used practice among people than the others, and it was super easy to follow and interesting as the site is very resourceful and colorful to make you follow along with what they're explaining.

Source #4

This eBook was written and published in Amsterdam by Momoko Nakamura. The book examines women's language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. It is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women's language, that we can deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse, and ideology. With this eBook, I learned again more about "women's language" and its origins, and its importance in political and social situations. Furthermore, this book made my understanding of my topic advance and continued to interest me. Finally, this eBook is fairly similar to my other sources as it talks about "women's language", and this source was easy to understand like others it had a clear table of contents to help me.

Source #5

This site was last edited on the 16th of December 2021. It focuses on the gender differences in Japanese grammar and its speech patterns associated with men and women. Wikipedia is always a little bit inaccurate sometimes, but I still learned a little bit about both the women's and men's speeches and how the current modern society does not necessarily speak in the ways attributed to their gender. Although this didn't really make me advance in my understanding nor did this source add too much to my knowledge as it is quite similar to some of my other sources and is the shortest read I did, it did continue to interest me further on my topic. At last, this source was easy to understand since it wasn't such a long read and the table of contents is very clear, and it had a lot of reference links.

Source #6

This online article was published on November 18 of 2005 and was written by Yoko Hasegawa from the University of California, Berkeley. This paper was written to be presented at the panel discussion, “Grammar and Politics in the Language Classroom,” at the Berkeley Language Center. In general, the paper talked about how traditional gendered Japanese speech forms do not necessarily directly index gender or gender ideas of masculinity and femininity. Instead, they must examine practical issues, as many of the so-called gendered patterns are purely ideological and do not often appear organically in common speech.

Thanks to this paper, I was able to learn one of the problems of gendered language in Japan is that is based on the idea of indexicality. This means that these concepts have been studied in terms of the relation between a language expression and its setting. This information advanced my understanding of my topic as it has increased my knowledge of the problem with something I didn’t know, and that increased my interest further on the topic. Compared to my other sources, it definitely had read the information that I’ve seen multiple times in other sources just put in different words but ultimately the same idea. Though I think it was a very good source as I got at least a new information out of it and it was interesting, plus the source was easy to understand and not too hard to follow because it was quite short.

Source #7

This peer-reviewed journal was first published in 1997 and was written by Shigeko Okamoto from the Department of Linguistics, California State University, in Fresno, USA. With the help of Co-editors, Anne Bezuidenhout and Andreas H. Jucker, the goal of this journal was to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. This journal discussed how in Japanese pragmatics and sociolinguistics, honorifics and sentence-final components have been extensively examined as indexical indications. We learn how the majority of past research has connected language forms to social contexts such as social distance, gender, etc., which tend to reflect “normative” usages or dominating linguistic ideology. However, Japanese speakers’ actual language habits may not always follow such “normative” purposes. In the study they made, they examined real-life conversational data for honorifics and ‘gendered’ sentence-final forms. The study indicated a wide range of applications, including several 'unusual' ones.

This journal had a lot of information, and I learned the relationship between social context and the use of certain sentence-final forms and honorifics in Japanese, which distinguish male and female speech styles from one another. Though this piece of information was similar to another reading I saw, it still made me advance in the understanding of my topic. Yet, my interest in the subject didn’t change much because of the similarities to my other sources. However, I did still enjoy some of the other information given in the journal. Additionally, the source was understandable and easy to read, each paragraph had titles and a brief introduction to the information given inside the paragraphs.

Source #8

"Gender Across Languages Vol. 3" is an E-book published on 10 April 2003 by the John Benjamins publishing company in Amsterdam/Philadelphia. The specific chapter about “Gendered structures in Japan” was written by Janet S. Shibamoto Smith. The book was written to provide a comprehensive collection of in-depth descriptions of gender-related issues in languages with very diverse structural foundations and socio-cultural backgrounds. In general, the chapter talks about many things but most importantly about the gendered structures Japan has for men and women, then focusing more on “women’s language”, and then showcasing a case study of “Ichiko”, a fictional representation of Japanese women from a novel who’s criticized for her speech form. The chapter concludes by saying that despite the absence of grammaticalized gender in the Japanese language, gender is a pervasive, highly salient category in Japanese society. As the lifeways of Japanese women and men provide more flexible and nuanced alternatives in the early 21st century, one may predict that gendered language will continue to be a central component of those "alternative ways of saying the same thing".

The E-book had general information I had read about before from other sources, so I didn’t take away much from it. Thus, I feel that it didn’t make me advance on my research but still keep my interest in the subject going. Overall, the source was easy to read and very understandable, and I thought that the case study they did was very interesting.

For this research, I mostly investigated the question of 'why do Japanese people use gendered language' and its origins. I mainly chose this topic because I love Japanese culture, and for a while, I've been trying to learn the language. I obviously saw how difficult it was but I also realized the little differences between men's and women's forms of speech, and I got naturally curious about it. Thus, why I chose this as my topic due to my previous knowledge of the subject. As I did my research on it, I found out more things than expected, though most were similar information from one source to another. Ultimately, I did learn that this gendered language comes out of this ideology Japanese people have for men and women and their relations. Plus, I learned a lot about "women's language", which was a big piece of recurring information from many articles I read, which further explained how this gender issue with language came from way back in time in Japan. In the end, I'm really glad to have done my research on this topic, as I got to know a lot about the subject that might help me in the future if I'm able to learn the Japanese language properly, and even if it isn't useful, it was still great general knowledge to talk about around the dinner table.