Masculine pronouns are not only for boys: Japanese girls breaking traditional relationships between gender and language in a school context

Abstract

Abstract Based on a longitudinal ethnography at a Japanese junior high school, this paper explores how ideologies of Japanese women’s language are subverted through girls’ everyday linguistic ideological work of breaking presumed linkages between female gender and language. Girls at Sakura Junior High School employed masculine and non-traditional first-person pronouns and created new sets of indexicalities. The ethnography tracks how the girls did this in three important ways: 1) They used the most masculine pronoun, ore, and attached positive metapragmatic meanings (such as “cool,” “powerful,” “independent,” and “assertive”) to their use of this pronoun. In doing so, they established a powerful ore register and persona for girl users. 2) They also interpreted their use of boku, a plain masculine pronoun, as gender-appropriate for girls, whereas they negatively regarded boy users of boku as weak mama’s boys. 3) They attached strongly negative metapragmatic meanings to feminine pronouns and created an unfavorable feminine register and persona for these pronouns from which they disaligned themselves. The girls’ persistence in aligning masculine and non-traditional registers did not point to any evidence of their desire to take on a male identity, but rather to their creation of positive indexicalities about masculine pronouns and to their engagement in the social capital of maleness that accompanies male speech. Consequently, girls’ ideological work contextually constructed new indexical fields where girls established their own space in which they severed the naturalized relationships between language, identities, and social categories.