How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite

Abstract

This study examines phonetic cues used to express politeness in spoken Japanese. The tasks of producing polite and non-polite speech in two different types of sentences (a question and a polite imperative) and in attitudinal speech (a request and a decline) were used to examine various F0 and temporal aspects of polite speech. Eight sentences spoken by 18 native speakers were acoustically measured at both sentence level and sentence final mora level. It was found that Japanese native speakers generally use a slower speech rate and a breathy voice for polite speech, but not necessarily a high pitched voice or wider pitch range, even in the case of female speakers. The use of pitch was found to be attitude dependent, but was not affected by the sentence type. Clear gender differences were seen in various phonetic aspects. Some politeness strategies observed at individual level are also reported.

Bilinguals Produce Pitch Range Differently in Their Two Languages to Convey Social Meaning

“….] does not think too highly of oneself” ( Haugh, 2007 , p. 88); however, in Japanese, politeness is linked to modesty and being reserved (“politeness-as-deference”; Tsurutani & Shi, 2018 , p. 131), whereas in English politeness is linked to friendliness ( Pizziconi, 2007 ).…”

“…Japanese men’s language is traditionally defined in opposition to JWL ( Ohara, 2019 ; Sturtz Sreetharan, 2004 ). In terms of pitch range, this has been referred to as “a low, almost monotonous, pitch” ( Loveday, 1981 , p. 83) and a generally “cooler” demeanor ( Loveday, 1981 ; Tsurutani & Shi, 2018 ). Importantly, there is evidence that (1) Japanese monolingual women and men consider high-pitched voices as more feminine (and more polite) than low-pitched voices ( Ofuka et al, 2000 ; Ohara, 1999 ) and (2) Japanese monolingual women, but not men, increase their pitch level and widen their pitch span to index politeness ( Ohara, 2004 ).…”

The Use of Bikago Beautified Style in Usage Instructions of Food, Beverage, and Pharmaceutical Products

“…The word beautified in the translation does not refer to the sound but to the image that the native Japanese speaker intends to portray. There are various English translations for bikago, i.e., beautification word (Akamatsu, 2011a;Tsurutani & Shi, 2018;Yamada, 2019), beautified form (Taguchi, 2009) beautifying word (Inoue, 2010) beautification expression (Ivana & Sakai, 2007) beautified word (Huynh, 2012), and beautiful speech (Hinds, 1983).…”

“…From the perspective of the user, bikago was a linguistic style used by women of higher social class (Tsurutani & Shi, 2018). Bikago was used to elevate one's self-worth.…”

“…Hence, it can be construed here that bikago was used by the upper class. In terms of the gender perspective, bikago is the linguistic style used by upper class women (Tsurutani & Shi, 2018). Its use does not rely on the social relations that the interlocutors have, but the style is used so that at least the speech sounds polite to the listener (Barešova, 2015).…”