Influential or influenced?

Abstract

his paper examines gendered speech in a corpus of 10 popular manga (Japanese comics) series, with attention to realism and genre based differences. While traditionally described as a highly gendered language, Japanese recently has appeared to be becoming less so. Manga are often given as one influential factor for these changes, particularly regarding girls’ use of masculine first-person pronouns; however, previous research has been contradictory, and the importance of gendered-genres leads one to anticipate differences in characters’ speech. In response, I looked at two markers of Japanese gendered speech – personal pronouns and sentence-final particles – finding that while personal pronoun usage was generally normative, all genders used a variety of gendered sentence-final particles. While genre-based variations such as more stereotypical speech in manga for boys may reflect narrative differences, I suggest that the data show that manga reflect previously established changes, as with sentence-final particles, thus appearing consistent with reports that mass-media are not a clear source of linguistic change. However, their perception as low texts may be influential in their association with negative changes, even when such claims are not supported empirically, as with personal pronouns. In this way, popular media’s role in changing gendered language is shown to be more complex than commonly assumed.