Acceso usuarios
In the field of language and gender, women's speech has often been analyzed in terms ofmen's ways of speaking in society or of its pragmatic function within the immediate context. Seeking the origins of women's speech in general, Ms paper describes the historical processes in which Japanese women's speech emerged in relation to the r öle of occupational speech in society. The focus of the analysis is on the two speech styles of female occupational groups that influenced the modern-day idea of "womens" or "feminine" speech in Japanese. One of the occupational styles, "court-lady speech" (nyoobo-kotobaj, originatedas the speech style ofwomen serving the imperial palace in the fourteenth Century. "Play-lady speech" (yuujogoj, also an occupational speech style, emerged around the seventeenth Century äs the language ofthe "play ladies" in the red-light district in large eitles of Japan. Drawing on data from studies of these two occupational groups, the authors introduce the sociohistorical background of the emergence of these speech styles and examine the linguistic characteristics of these occupational codes. Then we describe the historical processes by which these styles spread to the public, influencing the form of modern Japanese gendered speech. The authors conclude that gendered speech needs to be studiedmore within its historical context in order to take into consideration the sociohistorical factors that contribute to the emergence and spread of gendered speech in general.
