Japanese Junior High School Students' Metapragmatic Commentaries: Shifting Gendered Language Ideologies

Abstract

This paper analyzes how Japanese junior high school students use gender-crossing first-person pronouns and construct metapragmatic commentaries about non-traditional gendered pronouns. Students' constructions of metapragmatic commentaries revealed three ways of producing creative indexicalities, diverging from hegemonic gendered language ideologies: 1) expressing less femininity was preferred and thus the less feminine and more casual uchi was preferred to atashi; 2) the use of masculine pronouns boku and ore by female students has become common and legitimized; and 3) the supposedly plain masculine pronoun, boku, was denigrated and indexed as undesirable masculinity. This study suggests that this interpretive subversion of gendered speech, along with changes in social ideologies of gender, contributed to shift gendered language ideologies. Thus, this study shows that meta-communication is a valuable window to analyze the relationships between language and society, micro and macro, and language and identities.