184 Terumi Imai
as /ߑukufuku/, “celebration,” where all the vowels are potentially devoiced,
only certain patterns are actually used out of the possible combinations of
devoiced and voiced vowels, and if the speaker does not use one of the pos-
sible patterns, that also sounds strange. Another example is Sakuma’s (1929)
comment that if someone does not devoice the high vowels in a devoicing
environment, they sound like they are from somewhere in the western part of
Japan, implying that those people in the western part are nonstandard speak-
ers, “hillbillies,” or people who don’t know how to speak “properly.” Fur-
thermore, the Japanese Pronunciation and Accent Dictionary speci¿ es which
vowels should be devoiced in standard Japanese. These facts point towards
the standard status of vowel devoicing.
How do we account for this? One thing that is clear is that younger speak-
ers are doing something different from the other age groups. No matter what
the reason for this pattern is, the data show that there is language change
(or at least age-grading) going on among younger speakers. Moreover, there
appears to be a new meaning attached to vowel devoicing; it is used to signal
a gender difference among younger speakers, not degree of standardness.
I’d like to suggest a possible reason for this language change or age-grading.
Japanese has considerable gender differences at all levels of language—use of
honori¿ cs, self-reference terms, voice pitch level, and so on—and is particularly
well-known for sentence-¿ nal particle differences. However, Okamoto (1995)
shows that younger female speakers actually use more masculine sentence-¿ -
nal forms than feminine ones. Also, it has been reported that younger females
are using more and more “male language.” This could suggest that linguistic
gender differences are lessening among younger speakers. If this is the case
and if younger male and female speech are becoming similar in terms of some
linguistic features, such as sentence-¿ nal particles and vocabulary, it is possible
to hypothesize that younger people may try to express gender differences in
another form. This could be manifested in their use of vowel devoicing—less
devoicing is feminine, and more devoicing is masculine, with no regard, except
perhaps historically, to its standard or nonstandard status. Perhaps because
of the association of vowel devoicing with more casual speech style, trigger-
ing more devoicing in young males’ speech, the association has arisen. Once
extensive use of devoicing among young males has established, young females
may have felt the need to distinguish themselves from males, resulting in less
devoicing. This differentiation does not extend to older age groups because they
still maintain the traditional gender differences in other areas.
There have been many recent studies done on Japanese women’s language
(Shibamoto 1985; Haig 1990; Ide and McGloin 1990; McGloin 1990; Okamoto
1995; Ide 1997; Ide and Yoshida 1999; Okamoto and Shibamoto 2004). Oka-
moto and Shibamoto (2004) suggest that the relationship of language and gender