La educación en Córdoba

Manga are in many ways a natural place to look for language change given that they are one of the most important linguistic resources in Japan today. As I argued in Chapter 1, the most popular type of manga, story-manga, are characterized by strong narrative structures (Takeuchi I. , 2006), making them heavily reliant upon linguistic elements to express their narratives. Even with sales numbers going down from their previous highs (Nakano, 2009), there is no doubt that they form one of the most widely read bodies of text in Japan today. It seems but natural to think that they should have an impact on the Japanese language; indeed, this appears to be a common line of thought, with manga often popularly noted as one location of linguistic change amongst young Japanese.

As noted previously, according to a 2008 survey conducted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (2010), approximately 45% of people thought that manga were influential in young people’s speech, second only to TV, family and friends. This maintained the results from the Agency’s (2001) survey, where 44.6% of respondents gave manga as a linguistically influential medium.

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Popular attention has been paid particularly to the role that manga may play in the changes to gendered speech patterns observed above. For example, one often sees discussions of manga and their influence on young women’s choice of the masculine first person pronouns ore and boku. In her surveys of female college students’

and their and their friends’ use of masculine personal pronouns, Endo (2001) found that some students attributed such usages to the influence of manga. Likewise, Nakamura ('Sei' to Nihongo: Kotoba ga Tsukuru Onna to Otoko, 2007) describes the usage of ore amongst female elementary school children, who associated it with the popular anime (animated cartoon) Crayon Shin-chan, whose rambunctious, mischievous and very crude (male) protagonist, Shin-chan, uses ore. In his analysis of boku-kko, Nishida (2011) also claims that boku-kko are common in manga, and calls upon several examples of them in his analysis.

Such explanations are also commonly found in popular discourse. Looking at Yahoo Chiebukuro, one finds many posts on the role of manga in girls’ use of boku and ore. Searching with the key words onna no ko (girl), ichininshou (first person pronoun), boku or ore and manga, controlling for orthographic differences through repeat searches, led to 89 different questions, of which 29 were related to questions about specific manga and/or instances of female characters using boku/ore, and 43 were questions concerning actual usage of boku/ore amongst women, with manga coming up in the discussions. (The remaining 17 were only incidentally related to these topics.) The earliest question was from October, 2004, and my search was conducted in September, 2012.

Amongst the 43 relevant questions about personal pronoun usage, the discussions would often point to manga as a reason for why girls would use boku and ore. To answer a question as to why men use ore and women use watashi, one user wrote “I know girls who use boku because of manga’s influence (Anonymous, 2006).” Out of four responses to another user’s post asking if any girls around them used boku or ore, two attested to their usage by girls around them who read manga (Taruruda, 2007). Another user, self-describing herself a female high school senior, asked for opinions on girls’ usages of ore and boku, and herself attested such patterns to manga;

additionally, two out of nine responses commented that manga were influential (Misamisa091v, 2009).

However, it is not entirely clear how influential manga may actually be. While the posts on Yahoo Chiebukuro show people’s associations between manga and girls’ usage of masculine personal pronouns, they do not specifically say what about manga might lead girls to do so. Do female characters in manga frequently use male forms? Are female readers copying the speech patterns of male protagonists? Or are there other issues at work here? These kinds of questions have been very difficult to assess objectively given the lack hitherto of empirical research on language in manga. While offering interesting and suggestive results, works such as Endo’s (2001) or Nakamura’s (2007) have focused on conscious surveys and interviews amongst young people on their personal pronoun usage and why they chose their personal pronouns, or individuals’ own anecdotal usages. What is known from such surveys is only that manga are thought to be (potentially negatively) influential,

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but we do not know anything about how language is actually being used in manga. While this tells us much about how manga are perceived in Japanese society, in evaluating such claims it is crucial that one have a clearer grasp of how personal pronouns—and more widely, other aspects of gendered speech—are actually used. Even Nishida’s (2011) study, while citing real examples of female characters using boku and ore in manga, is limited in that he fails to discuss what kind of manga he is using, and instead treats all manga as one type, which is clearly not the case.

In considering what kind of a linguistic resource manga might be, it is important to reflect upon its nature as fiction. As a popular linguistic resource, manga must maintain a certain level of realism in order for readers to be engaged by them, and as Ueno (2006, p. 17) describes, manga may “influence readers in framing their gender identities as well as their linguistic behavior.” As noted earlier, if the speech it uses is too unrealistic, readers may not be able to fully relate to the characters. Linguistic realism being important, one might anticipate great pressure on authors to make their speakers appear naturalistic. Yet at the same time, as works of fiction, manga are constantly trying to find balance between the needs for realism and the utilization of linguistic conveniences such as stereotypical speech patterns.

As I suggested earlier, of relevance here is the concept of yakuwari-go, which has become popular in recent years. Defined by Kinsui (2003, p. 205) as “speech patterns which are aligned to the images of their speakers,” yakuwari-go could be thought of a specific kind of register, or a linguistic variety “associated with particular situational contexts or purposes (Biber, 1995, p. 1).” Registers have often received attention for their role in creating social identities, such as how the use of medical terminology by doctors helps define them socially as professionals, and yakuwari-go are similar in that they help authors create easily recognizable identities for characters. While registers are parts of natural speech, however, yakuwari-go are as if they had been taken one step further, so that while they help identify characters, they no longer are necessarily naturalistic.

Kinsui (2007, p. 98) has argued that they are particularly prevalent in manga, to which he says they are

“essential”. This has resulted in a renewed interest in language patterns in manga, accompanied by several new reports on yakuwari-go. Takahashi (2009) showed how different (female) characters are made to speak depending on their character type using the shoujo-manga series Life as a case study. Jung (2005) looked at the ways that yakuwari-go are used in Japanese manga and their Korean translations, finding that where the original Japanese texts tended to use more yakuwari-go related to gender, their Korean translations tended to use more yakuwari-go related to speakers’ ages. Kurosaki (2011) focused on the use of the non-standard masculine first-person pronoun washi, used commonly in manga and anime amongst professorial characters, looking for its origins as yakuwari-go in dialects and Edo-period texts.

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The tension between realism and stereotype makes one wonder how gendered speech is really used.

While the studies described above all pointed to the commonness of yakuwari-go, others have suggested that speech patterns in manga may be comparatively realistic. Ueno (2006) examined the use of SFPs in shoujo-manga and rediisu-shoujo-manga (ladies’-shoujo-manga; shoujo-manga for female readers one generation older than shoujo-shoujo-manga readers), and found that the use of strongly feminine SFPs goes up amongst with characters’ ages in both genres, similar to the gradated patterns that are expected. Young girls in shoujo-manga particularly used SFPs that are comparatively realistic; but they overused masculine forms in ladies’-manga. Older characters also overused strongly feminine forms in shoujo-manga. Ueno attributes this gap partially to differences in how older and younger women perceive each other, but it is also similar to the results that Okamoto (1995) and Philips (2001) found for real life SFP usage: That is, younger women are using feminine forms less and masculine forms more.

In examining the use of SFPs in three series published approximately 15 years apart starting in the 1970s, Aizawa (2003) found that feminine SFPs went down over time, from the oldest to newest series, suggesting a drop in feminine forms similar to that which was found in real life. Similarly, Chinami (2001) found that while female characters still tended to use feminine SFPs, they appeared to be on the decline. Akitsuki (2006) also notes that recent shoujo-manga such as Nana represented a departure from traditional characterization with their use of masculine-speech heroines, which he suggested might form a new type of yakuwari-go.

The use of gendered speech and yakuwari-go in manga thus appear to be extremely complex, and there remain some major gaps in our understanding. While there have been some quantitative studies on the use of language in manga such as Ueno (2006), they are exceptions rather than the rule. Most research on yakuwari-go has been qualitative, making it particularly difficult to evaluate whether claims that yakuwari-go are common in manga are well founded. Even Ueno’s study is limited in that it targeted only series for female readers, and looked exclusively at female speech; thus there is very little knowledge of what male speech is like aside from what Kinsui (2003), (2007) originally described. One can expect, however, that there are differences between how characters are depicted between the genres. As Ueno’s (2006) study showed, female characters differed in usage patterns even within genres aimed for women, and it is not hard to imagine that this would be the case between shoujo-manga and shounen-manga as well; there is no reason to think that such differences would not also exist for male characters.

How characters utilize gendered speech in manga is clearly central to how characters are constructed, and the corpus used here presents a unique opportunity to look at how all of the characters—male and female alike—use gendered speech in representative series from shoujo-manga and shounen-manga. To consider how some of the issues described play out, I used the data from the morpheme analysis described in Chapter

3

conduct three surveys on (1) the use of Lines by different gendered characters; (2) the use and distribution of

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personal pronouns; and (3) the use and distribution of SFPs. Personal pronouns and SFPs were targeted in (2) and (3) because they are both considered key elements of yakuwari-go (Kinsui, 2003), and because of their obvious importance in gendered language. However, it is also important to understand how much text is actually being used by male and female characters—the goal of (1)—as this would be expected to have an impact on the types of text characters will use. As I will describe in more detail below, the role of characters in the text, and particularly their centrality, has impacts on these issues (Kinsui, 2003). Thus, examining the distribution of Lines themselves is a necessary first step as it offers crucial background information on how characters are being manipulated. While it will become obvious that, particularly in shounen-manga, yakuwari-go speech patterns are not unusual, it is important to consider what type of characters are more prone to using them, and whether this effects how commonly such forms are seen.

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