Hello! I’m a Japanese Major who’s writing a term paper about gender differences in speech in Japanese, and I was wondering what in particular I should look into. I’m certainly not fluent in the language yet, so I’d like to confirm that I’m not misunderstanding things, as I’d like to avoid writing about false information. Lexical differences aren’t particularly a problem because, as far as I’m aware, that’ll include differences in kinship terms and pronouns. Phonetic differences would be the female tendency to use rising pitch while males use falling (if that’s the correct term). As for syntactic differences, would the use of かしら, わ, and differences of explainer の in informal fit that category? Particularly かしら is throwing me off, because I could see that being a lexical difference as well if it’s a word instead of a particle. I also know that men are more likely to use informal speech, while women tend to use polite speech more often. I’m only a linguistics minor, and I’m not fully educated on the topic yet, so my understanding could be a bit incorrect. I was also wondering if there are any examples of discourse differences in the language I should consider. I know Korean has some, but I’m curious if that’s the same for Japanese.
by Jake_The_Snake2003