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Japanese pronouns (代名詞, daimeishi) are words in the Japanese language used to address or refer to present people or things, where present means people or things that can be pointed at. The position of things (far away, nearby) and their role in the current interaction (goods, addresser, addressee , bystander) are features of the meaning ...
Japanese exhibits pronoun avoidance, meaning that using pronouns is often too direct in Japanese, and considered offensive or strange. [6] One would not use pronouns for oneself, 私 (watashi, 'I'), or for another, あなた (anata, 'you'), but instead would omit pronouns for oneself, and call the other person by name:
Many languages feature the T–V distinction, where two or more different pronouns are used contextually to convey formality or familiarity.In contrast, languages with pronoun avoidance tend to feature complex systems of honorifics and use pronoun avoidance as a form of negative politeness, [2] instead employing expressions referring to status, relationship or title. [1]
Japanese uses honorific constructions to show or emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank. The choice of pronoun used, for example, will express the social relationship between the person speaking and the person being referred to, and Japanese often avoids pronouns entirely in favor of more explicit titles or kinship terms. [2]
The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences (other than occasional inverted sentences or sentences containing afterthoughts) always end in a verb (or other predicative words like adjectival verbs, adjectival nouns, auxiliary verbs)—the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as ka, ne, and yo.
Appropriate usages include divine entities, guests or customers (such as a sports venue announcer addressing members of the audience), and sometimes towards people one greatly admires. It is the root word for -san. Deities such as native Shinto kami and Jesus Christ are referred to as kami-sama, meaning "Revered spirit-sama".
The pronoun ani is often contracted to aN-when consonant-initial particles are adjoined to it. Hachijō dare is related to the Old Japanese pronoun ta ~ tare "who," but it is unclear whether the change of initial t to d was borrowed from Japanese or was an independent parallel innovation.
Research on Japanese men's speech shows greater use of "neutral" forms, forms not strongly associated with masculine or feminine speech, than is seen in Japanese women's speech. [12] Some studies of conversation between Japanese men and women show neither gender taking a more dominant position in interaction.