Japanese language and gender research

Abstract

In the past thirty years, major contributions from Japanese language and gender studies have provided necessary insights from the perspective of a non-European language. Future research will demand ever broader approaches – in particular, I call for investigations of the sociolinguistic life of understudied speakers, such as regional Japanese speakers, to examine how they understand linguistic gender norms and deploy a wide variety of linguistic and other semiotic resources for styling diverse forms of gender and sexual identity in situated practice. These questions have profound implications for the relationship between language and gender.