6.3. SOCIAL LANGUAGE PATTERNS 305
Japanese has no explicit plurals, so you might think that expressing
”we” or ”them” might require separate words too, but this is not the case.
There exist group suffixes in Japanese that can be used with person pro-
nouns to turn the single person ”me” into the group ”we”, the single per-
son ”you” into the group ”you [people]” and the single persons ”he”/”she”
into the group ”them”:
. This is the common group-suffix for turning
personal pronouns into personal group pronouns. There is a second group
suffix, used with a few specific pronouns, being
. This is an older suf-
fix, and can be used to turn (’you’) into (plural ’you’), (’he’)
into (’them’) and (accusative ’you’) into (plural accusative
’you’).
When using group suffixes for or , it depends entirely on the
gender of the first person in the group that you refer to. If there’s a group
of mixed gender but you were just talking about a female member of the
group, then the entire group can be referred to using. Similarly, if
a male member of the group was talked about, will refer to the ex-
act same group. It should be noted that these markers are not true plural
markers. literally means ”the group I am part of”, and can refer to ei-
ther a physical group gathered at some point in time at a specific location,
or can refer to someone’s in group. Similarly, is also a group marker,
where for instance means ”the group you are part of”. It is impor-
tant to remember this, as some translations for sentences that have plural
personal pronouns cannot use these / markers:
”As the commiĴee on social affairs we have decided to ....”This kind of sentence, in which someone speaks for an entire group,requires the ”group representative” personal pronoun
, typically used
in the paĴerns
[...] and
[...]. If one does not just speak as a rep-
resentative of a group, but speaks in name of the entire group, rather than
using the group suffixes or , the special word
, is used.
However, the most important thing to remember is that you should
try to use personal pronouns as liĴle as possible. Instead, if you’re referring
to someone of whom you know the name, use their name suffixed with
, or a more specific name suffix instead. If you do not know their name,
find out what it is. The only polite way to refer to people is as people –
avoid referring to them as mere objects by using pronouns.