Abstract

Japanese society’s traditional gender norms are still enforced today and reflected by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in daily conversation, commonly classified as either masculine (e.g., na, sa, zo, ze), associated with strengthening an utterance, or feminine (e.g., wa and no), associated with softening an utterance. Previous research on gendered speech has mostly explored female expressions due to the lower social status of women. However, in recent years, Japanese young people have started to use gendered SFPs in “unclassical” ways. This study focuses specifically on male usage of the feminine SFPs wa and no. 48 cases of wa and 63 cases of no were collected from 12 recorded conversations of males and females (19-22 years old) on TalkBank. Examination using a discourse analysis approach revealed that although wa and no can be used by males in a similar manner to females, both particles display new functions that differ from their original usages. Unexpectedly, wa is used significantly more frequently by males than by females. Males often use wa similarly to females to show an attitude of amae toward the addressee as in the example ukaranwa, tabun ”I probably won’t get accepted,” in which a male speaker expresses worry to his friends about an interview he had taken. However, the use of wa to enforce an exclamation is only observed in males’ utterances. Our examination also demonstrates that unlike females, men tend to use no to emphasize new information with a tone of assertion/unexpectedness rather than softening/explanation. For example, in a conversation with friends, a male uses the phrase sugoi no “It’s crazy” to emphasize his unusual spending habits. The present study hopes to inspire future research to further investigate the usage of masculine SFPs, such as na and sa, by young females in modern Japanese society.