Gender, Language, and Modernity: Toward an Effective History of Japanese Women's Language

"Women's language" is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge in contemporary Japan. In this article, I examine the genealogy of Japanese women's language by locating its emergence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when state formation, capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and radical class reconfiguration were taking off. I show how particular speech forms were carved out as women's language in a network of diverse modernization practices. I theorize the historical relationship between Japan's linguistic modernity-language standardization, the rise of the novel, and print capitalism-and the emergence of Japanese women's language.