302 CHAPTER 6. LANGUAGE PATTERNS
fact that you acted inappropriately by a change in speech paĴern, and you
would do well to notice it - making someone lose face, or not giving enough
face, can only be compensated by observing the right levels of formality
again until the incident has been forgoĴen, or at least left in the past.
This also means that you are responsible for demanding face your-
self. Not demanding face because you’re just that nice a person doesn’t fly.
You are responsible for behaving properly according to Japanese custom,
and that means you must take responsibility when it comes to maintaining
the social balance. If someone gets too familiar with you, a change from
formal polite to distal polite language is the clearest signal you can give
that certain boundaries have been crossed.
6.3.2 Addressing people
Certainly one of the things that is more important in Japanese than in a
lot of western cultures, in terms of social language use, is picking the right
pronouns and names when addressing people. Not because the terms are
particularly difficult, but just because there are actually a great number to
choose from. Personal Pronouns and name suffixes play an important role
in being able to navigate your way through interpersonal dealings, so a
brief moment to examine which words can be used, and when, will go a
long way to helping you stay on top of every day Japanese.
Personal pronouns
Some people may tell you that Japanese has no word for ”you”, based on
the fact that the standard way to address someone in Japanese is to use their
name, paired with a suffix to indicate their title, rank, or social relation to
you. However, this would be drawing the wrong conclusion: one avoids
using direct personal pronouns as much as possible in Japanese, but there
are in fact a great number of direct personal pronouns that can be used
when the need arises. The important thing to note is that because of the
way in which people are normally addressed, using personal pronouns
carries ”extra weight” – all of them mean more than just ”I” or ”you”. Spe-
cific pronouns connote differences in social levels, as well as different po-
liteness levels.
As mentioned all the way at the beginning of this book, Japanese
is a sparse language, and personal pronouns fall in the category of words
that are omiĴed once established in a conversation. While in English, for
instance, one would constantly use the personal pronoun ”you” to indicate
a listener or reader, in Japanese this is considered poor language skills and