Background

Miyako Inoue (2006) describes how gendered speech types became linked to gendered types of people at the turn of the 20th century in Japan, and she shows how this discursive work contributed to broader sociohistorical processes. Her research illustrates how discourse analysis beyond the speech event can be productively applied to archival data. “Women’s language,’’ according to Inoue, “is a set of linguistic beliefs about forms and functions of language used by and associated with (Japanese) women” (2006, p. 13). In the U.S., linguistic features that can be associated with certain types of women and girls include tag questions (ending statements with questions, as in “that movie was great, wasn’t it?”) and uptalk (ending statements with rising intonation, as in “I live in Brooklyn?”). In a similar way, the sentence-final particles -tcyo and -dayo are linguistic features associated with certain kinds of women and girls in Japan. As Inoue argues, these features do not necessarily describe the actual speech of women, but most people believe that they do. Inoue focuses not on women’s speech itself, but on speech about women’s speech, on how people describe the supposedly characteristic speech of women.

Inoue argues that the variety known as “Japanese women’s language” has not always had the same social value. Through her analysis of discursive materials from the 1800s to the present, she identifies three main phases in which “Japanese women’s language” has been understood in different ways: first as vulgar “schoolgirl speech” in the late 1800s, then as urban middle-class “women’s language” in the early 1900s, and finally as gentle and refined “women’s language” in the late 1900s. Her analysis shows how contemporary discourse on women’s language, which bemoans the loss of a beautiful and sophisticated feminine style, forgets that these gendered linguistic forms were initially considered obscene and associated with the “private” activities of geishas.

In this chapter, we present a few pieces of data from the first two phases of “Japanese women’s language,” enough to show how Inoue applies discourse analysis beyond the speech event to reveal interesting patterns in her data. See Inoue (2006) for the detailed presentation of her argument. Inoue relies on two main sources of archival data to build her arguments about the first two phases. First, she examines commentaries on the speech of schoolgirls that appeared in Japanese print media from the 1880s through the early 1900s. She focuses on how male intellectuals reported the “strange” sounds of schoolgirls that they allegedly overheard. In these materials, readers encountered “schoolgirl speech” as reported by male “listening subjects.” Second, Inoue examines images of women speaking in women’s magazines from the early 1900s through the 1930s. She focuses on how photos and illustrations of urban middle-class women were accompanied by captions that claimed to represent their typical speaking voices. In these materials, readers encountered “women’s language,” allegedly as it was spoken by women themselves. In this second phase, “schoolgirl speech” gradually becomes understood as “women’s language,” as gendered linguistic features become associated with a more universal urban middle-class female speaker. Inoue uses discourse analysis beyond the speech event to trace the solidifying pathways across which this historical change occurred.

Inoue emphasizes a distinction between what she calls “quoted speech” and “quoting speech.” She uses “quoted speech” to describe speech that is presented as occurring outside of the immediate moment of speaking. For example, in the preceding excerpt, Takeuchi writes: “They use such speech as ii(n)-dayo.” The use of “they” seems to indicate that “ii(n)-dayo” is the speech of “them,” the “former geisha,” which took place in some other time and place. Male authors in print media used quoted speech to characterize “schoolgirl speech” around the turn of the 20th century. “Quoting speech” describes speech that is presented as occurring within the moment of speaking. This often occurs when print media juxtaposes an image of a person with a piece of text such that the person is understood as the speaker of that text. To use an example that we will discuss later, the use of the first-person pronoun “I” in “I used to have frizzy hair” suggests that the person pictured next to these words is the speaker of these words. Quoting speech was more typical in the second phase, when “women’s language” was animated by images of female bodies in women’s magazines.