Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Which personal pronouns and sentence ending particles would an old man use?


I'm somewhat informed on gendered speech in Japanese, however, I have also heard that age may play a part in which pronouns and sentence ending particles you use and can get away with. For instance, a teenage boy is more likely to get away with using slightly effeminate language than a grown man would be. What sort of pronouns (私, 俺, 僕, est.) and sentence ending particles (の, か, かしら, わ, よ, ぞ) would a typical elderly male use (In the standard Tokyo dialect)?



Answer



This is not really an answer, but I would like to draw the attention to the distinction between speech in fictional work and speech in the real world.



In fictional work, there is a set of words (most notably personal pronouns and function words) which are considered to be typical to a certain group of people, regardless of whether the people in the same group in the real world actually use them. It is called a role language (役割語). As dainichi explained, first-person pronoun わし and copula じゃ are part of the role language for old male speakers. So are second-person pronoun お[主]{ぬし} and the use of ~しておる instead of ~している. However, I am pretty sure that few old male people actually say any of these.


My guess is that old male speakers do not have particularly different words from other adult male speakers, but I am not very sure about this part.


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