Gender Identity in a Second Language: The Use of First Person Pronouns by Male Learners of Japanese

This is a qualitative sociocultural study examining how five advanced-level learners of Japanese from the United States use gendered first person pronouns to negotiate their identities. Japanese does not have a ubiquitous pronoun such as English I. Instead, the language contains forms that are marke...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of language, identity, and education identity, and education, 2017-03, Vol.16 (2), p.94-108
Main Authors: Brown, Lucien, Cheek, Elizabeth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advanced Students
Case Studies
English language
Form Classes (Languages)
Formality
Gender identity
Graduate Students
Identity in second language learning
Japanese
Japanese language
Language
language and gender
Language culture relationship
male learners
Males
Negotiation
Pronouns
Qualitative Research
Second Language Learning
Self concept
Semi Structured Interviews
Sex differences
Sexual Identity
sociocultural SLA
Undergraduate Students
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This is a qualitative sociocultural study examining how five advanced-level learners of Japanese from the United States use gendered first person pronouns to negotiate their identities. Japanese does not have a ubiquitous pronoun such as English I. Instead, the language contains forms that are marked for formality and gender, including watashi (formal/feminine), ore (informal/masculine) and boku (neutral/boyish). We collected recordings of the learners speaking with four different native-speaker interlocutors (female friend, male friend, female stranger, male stranger) and conducted retrospective interviews. The analysis shows that these learners were actively involved in choosing pronouns that indexed their identities as men, although these masculine identities were not always ratified by their Japanese interlocutors. One reason for this was that the male identities expressed by the learners were at times closer to American than to Japanese masculinities. Learners also used pronouns as a resource to index their identities as proficient speakers of Japanese.
ISSN:1534-8458
1532-7701
DOI:10.1080/15348458.2016.1277948