Regions Where Watashi (“I”) is More Likely to Appear in Speech: From the Viewpoint of the Relationship between Self and Others

Abstract

There are some dialect regions in Japan where watashi and variants of the first-person pronoun “I” are more likely to appear in speech than others. “I” often appears in speech in Tohoku dialect, while not often in Kinki dialect. In Tohoku, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are not clearly separated, and ‘self’ is embedded in the community. Therefore, when the focus is on ‘self’, it is necessary to mark it linguistically and we see the emergence of “I” in speech. In Kinki dialect, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are separate, and even within the community each ‘self’ is independent. Therefore, even when referring to the ‘self’, the need to mark it linguistically is weak, and thus ‘I’ appears less frequently in speech than in Tohoku dialect.