Japanese Honorifics

Opposition

Modern English Honorifics

The most common honorifics in modern English are usually placed immediately before the name of the subject. Honorifics which can be used of any adult of the appropriate sex include "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss", and "Ms". Other honorifics denote the honored person’s occupation, for instance "Doctor", "Coach", Officer, "Father" (for a priest), or "Professor". Abbreviations of academic degrees, used after a person's name, may also be seen as a kind of honorific (e.g. "Jane Doe, Ph.D.")

Some honorifics act as complete replacements for a name, as "Sir" or "Ma'am", or "Your Honour". Subordinates will often use honorifics as punctuation before asking a superior a question or after responding to an order: "Yes, Sir" or even "Sir, yes Sir."

A judge is addressed as "Your Honour" when on the bench, and may be referred to as "His/Her Honour"; the plural form would be "Your Honours". Similarly, a monarch (ranking as a king or emperor) and his consort may be addressed or referred to as "Your/His/Her Majesty", "Their Majesties", etc. (but there is no customary honorific accorded to a female monarch's consort, as he is usually granted a specific style). Monarchs below kingly rank are addressed as "Your/His/Her Highness", the exact rank being indicated by an appropriate modifier, e.g. "His Serene Highness" for a member of a princely dynasty, or "Her Grandducal Highness" for a member of a family that reigns over a grand duchy. Verbs with these honorifics as subject are conjugated in the third person (e.g. "you are going" vs. "Your Honour is going" or "Her Royal Highness is going").

People who have a strong sense of egalitarianism, such as Quakers and certain socialists, eschew honorific titles. When addressing or referring to someone, they will use the person's name, an informal pronoun, or some other style implying social equality, such as "brother", "friend", or "comrade". This was also the practice in Revolutionary France which used Citoyen (Citizen) as the manner of address.

Japanese honorifics (called KeiSyou) are similar to English titles like "Mister" and "Miss". "Kimi" (君), "ﾞTono" (殿), "Kata" (方), "Uhe" (上), "Phime" (姫), etc. It takes KeiSyou after his/her name. For example, (TennOu) "HeiKa", (Royal family) "DenKa". In Japanese, which has many honorifics, their use is mandatory in many formal and informal social situations. Japanese grammar as a whole tends to function on hierarchy — honorific stems are appended to verbs and some nouns, and in many cases one word may be exchanged for another word entirely with the same verb- or noun-meaning, but with different honorific connotations. The Japanese personal pronouns are a good example of the honorific hierarchy of the Japanese language — there are five or more words that correspond to each of the English words, "I" and "you".

Japanese provides an excellent case study of honorifics. Honorifics in Japanese can be divided into two categories:

· addressee honorifics, which index deference to the addressee of the utterance;

· referent honorifics, which index deference to the referent of the utterance.

Cynthia Dunn claims that “almost every utterance in Japanese requires a choice between direct and distal forms of the predicate” [4]. The direct form indexes intimacy and “spontaneous self-expression” in contexts involving family and close friends. Contrarily, distal form index social contexts of a more formal, public nature such as distant acquaintances, business settings, or other formal settings.

Japanese also contains a set of humble forms (Japanese kenijyoogo) which are employed by the speaker to index their deference to someone else. There are also suppletive forms that can be used in lieu of regular honorific endings (for example, the subject honorific form of taberu [to eat]: meshiagaru). Verbs that involve human subjects must choose between distal or direct forms (towards the addressee) as well as distinguish between either no use of referant honorifics, use of subject honorific (for others), or use of humble form (for self). The Japanese model for non-referential indexicality demonstrates a very subtle and complicated system that encodes social context into almost every utterance.

[ Affinal Taboo Index

Dyirbal, a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland, employs a system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items:

1) an “everyday” or common interaction set of lexical items,

2) a “mother-in-law” set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law.

In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four “everyday” lexical entries for everyone “mother-in-law” lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference exigent of contexts inclusive of the mother-in-law.

Dyirbal (also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by about 5 speakers of the Dyirbal tribe. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well-known among linguists.

There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.

Avoidance speech, or " mother-in-law languages ", is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu languages (called ukuhlonipa in Zulu, for example) of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be used.

Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than is normal speech, since it only needs to be used when conversation with the taboo relatives is absolutely necessary.

For instance, in Dyirbal there is the regular speech style (called Guwal) and the avoidance style Dyalngui consisting of a special set of lexical items that are substituted for Guwal words in the presence of opposite-sex parents-in-law, opposite-sex children-in-law, and opposite-sex cross-cousins. These words are fewer, however, and their meanings tend to be much more generic, e.g. the Dyalngui verb bubaman does service for the Guwal verbs baygun "shake", dyindan "wave" and banyin "smash".

Hypercorrection as a Social Class Index

Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as “the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy” [11]. DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that “hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered” [3]. Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of “social class” and an “index of linguistic insecurity”. The latter index can be defined as a speaker’s attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility [10].

Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes “hand-in-hand” with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of “lesser” phonological variants [10]. He concluded that sociologically “lesser” individuals would try to approximate frequencies of more prestige dialectical vowels; yet they did so incorrectly, thus producing the phenomenon known as hypercorrection. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an “index of linguistic insecurity” in which a speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects the encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality) [8].

Multiple Indices in Social Identity Indexicality

Multiple non-referential indices can be employed to index the social identity of a speaker. An example of how multiple indexes can constitute social identity is exemplified by Elinor Ochs discussion of copula deletion: “That Bad” in American English can index a speaker to be a child, foreigner, medical patient, or elderly person. Use of multiple non-referential indices at once (for example copula deletion and raising intonation), helps further index the social identity of the speaker as that of a child [6].

Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance -wa in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who “looks like a woman” and another who looks “like a man” may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference. Ochs and Schieffilen also claim that facial features, gestures, as well as other non-linguistic indices may actually help specify the general information provided by the linguistic features and augment the pragmatic meaning of the utterance [7].

Oinoglossia (‘Wine Talk’)

For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of “life-style emblematization” or “convention-dependent-indexical iconicity” which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs “wine talk.” Professional wine critics use a certain “technical vocabulary” that are “metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture” [8]. Thus, a certain “lingo” is created for this wine that indexically entails certain notions of prestigious social classes or genres. When “yuppies” use the lingo for wine flavors created by the these critics in the actual context of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become the “well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person” that is iconic of the metaphorical “fashion of speaking” employed by people of higher social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship [8]. In other words, the wine drinker becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a smiliar level of connoisseurship and social refinement. Silverstein defines this as an example of higher-order indexical "authorization" in which the indexical order of this “wine talk” exists in a “complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macro-sociological interests” [8]. A speaker of English metaphorically transfers him- or herself into the social structure of the “wine world” that is encoded by the oinoglossia of elite critics using a very particular “technical” terminology.

The use of “wine talk” or similar “fine-cheeses talk”, “perfume talk”, etc. confers upon an individual an identity-by-visible-consumption indexical of a certain macro-sociological elite identity and is, as such, an instance of higher-order indexicality.

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