Variation in Japanese gender-related expressions: Utterance final particles and their phonetic characteristics in young speakers

International audienceOne of the well known characteristics of Japanese is the difference in the speech styles of men and women. However that gender-related phenomenon doesn't seem so acute among the younger generations. This is illustrated by the use of the masculine and feminine forms ('-nda' '-no') of the auxiliary verb '-da'. A sociolinguistic survey shows that the feminine ending form ('-no') is less frequent among women under 30 (Ozaki, 1997). Moreover, Tokyo young female students, make a greater use of the masculine form '-nda' in their friendly speech than older women, particularly in explaining causes but less so in describing situations (Yabe, 2000). Thus among the younger Japanese, lexical and syntactic choices do not seem to be direct functions of speaker gender.<BR />Our previous studies have shown that differences in speaker sex were indicated through the phonetic characteristics of gender forms (absent in writing). The most noteworthy observation was the presence of rising and/or falling intonational patterns in utterances with "-nda" endings. The objective of this paper is to develop an experimental procedure with data on gender forms in written and oral material ('-nda', '-no', '-kara', and '-te') and carry out statistical analyses with factors such as context, speaker sex, condition, and lexico-syntactic items. Analyses are expected to reveal the framework of expression of gender. Concomitantly in order to establish comparisons, data from languages in which gender does not play a significant role have been collected. Chinese, Korean, French and German adult learners of Japanese have thus been recorded