Contested ideas about womanhood and female speech in contemporary Japan: a comparative research made at Italian Universities

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to understand if Japanese as a foreign language learners in Italy are conversant with (1) dominant language ideology about ‘women’s language’and (2) find the confirmation of their language expectations on women’s language when they experience spoken contacts with Japanese girls or women. By doing so, I seek to understand how the women’s language they study in the classroom relate to the actual language use they experience outside the classroom.

There are several studies on Japanese women’s language. Particularly accurate are the study of Endō Orie, Inoue Miyako, Katsue Akiba Reynolds and Momoko Nakamura, who identified the different influences of the language ideology and the linguistic changes throughout the Japanese history to the modern Japan. They all agree that ‘women’s language’, as we know it today, is a modernist ideological construct.

I am conduct this research through two Matched Guise Questionnaires. I distributed the first questionnaire among 10 Japanese native teachers who lived and taught in Italy for several years. The second questionnaire was assigned to 30 Italian students of Japanese language aged between 20 and 25.

With this research, I expect to identify specific language ideologies, attitudes and uses to be passed from the professors to the students, specifically about the Japanese women’s language. The tendency to simplify concepts is the core property of language ideologies. We stand to expect that they could be absorbed by students. I expect, therefore, to discover that this research will confirm the hypothesis that the Italian students of Japanese language have a tendency to idealize the Japanese women’s language along the lines of modernist language ideology.