6.3. SOCIAL LANGUAGE PATTERNS 301
employee. To your mentor, you will rank as ’not on the social ladder yet’,
and to you, your mentor will sit in the formal out-group. This means that
you may be addressed using or , and you will address him or
her with their title,
, while you are being mentored.
Now we fast-forward the clock half a year. You have been accepted
into the workforce formal in-group, and have even made a good friend
from within that group, going drinking on the weekends with them. You
are still working with your mentor, but no longer under a mentor/trainee
relation, but as a cow-orker relation, and you decide that it is time you
start to use their name suffixed with , rather than keep calling them
, and in doing so you have made a critical and relationship breaking
mistake. Moving people from a group to a more intimate group always re-
quires explicit permission from the person you’re moving - if your mentor
never indicated that he or she believed you were now well integrated into
the workforce, then you could sing high or low, work there for six months
or six years, but until they gave notice that they consider you worth giv-
ing more face, they will stay a , and unilaterally deciding that you
no longer consider them that means you are not showing them the right
amount of face.
The same goes for making friends in school. You address people as
if they’re part of the informal out-group until they indicate that you may re-
fer to them in a way consistent with the formal or familiar in-group. When
the relation is between someone of higher social status and someone of
lower social status, the permission has to come from the person of higher
social status, but in situations where the social status is on equal footing,
such as with classmates or co-workers, it typically involves a period of feel-
ing around for the boundaries of your personal relationship, and at some
point at least indicating that you do not mind if they refer to you in a way
that corresponds to a closer group.
Demanding face
If things go wrong, it would be wonderful if someone would just say that
it did, but typically this will not happen. Instead, rather than explaining
that they are uncomfortable with you addressing them using the speech
paĴerns belonging to a more intimate group than they expect to be in, their
own speech paĴern will become more distal. What was natural Japanese
one day may suddenly be changed to formal and distant Japanese after
your mistake, and that’s usually the only clue you’ll get that something
went wrong. Rather than demand face, you will be confronted with the