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The green leaves of love: Japanese romantic heroines, authentic femininity, and dialect 1
Author(s) -
Shibamoto Smith Janet S.,
Occhi Debra J.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of sociolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9841
pISSN - 1360-6441
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2009.00422.x
Subject(s) - femininity , ideology , romance , language ideology , sociology , drama , linguistics , gender studies , literature , art , philosophy , political science , politics , law
How is ‘authentic’ linguistic femininity in Japan manifested in popular texts? We analyze the dialogue of female characters in Wakaba , a 2005 Japanese drama set in two very different parts of ‘regional’ Japan – Miyazaki and Kobe. Through this analysis, we examine two contradictory discourses circulated through popular media. The first is that linguistic femininity is based in Standard Japanese – a surprisingly persistent ideology despite a current trend to examine cases in which language ideology and practice do not match. Other studies reflect another dominant discourse, that of the ‘authentic’ dialect speaker, who expresses local alignment by using dialect forms outside the bounds of ideologically modern linguistic forms. The tension between acting linguistically feminine and ‘authentically’ local raises some interesting questions for Japanese language and gender studies, including studies of gendered representations: are women who are speakers of regional dialects authentically ‘feminine’? Can they be? Do some dialects express femininity better than others?