Japanese words for lesbians

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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In Japanese slang, dyke is rezu - clipped form of rezubian, from the English word “lesbian.” In formal Japanese, lesbian is doseiai no onna, literally ‘same-sex love woman’.

Atashi rezu yo! Dakara nan datte yu no?
So I’m a dyke! You got a problem with that?

They made a verb of rezu too:

Rezutta koto aru?
Have you ever done it with another woman?

A bull dyke is otoko-onna, literally ‘man-woman’.

Pejorative Japanese words for lesbian include onabe ‘pan’ (a play on the word okama for male gay, meaning ‘pot’), chidori ‘plover, wading bird’, itachi, ‘weasel’.

Diesel dyke is otachi. Derived from a term from Kabuki theater: tachiyaku, the sturdy, dynamic, masculine role.

Femmes are neko ‘cat’ and nenne ‘girly’.

Ano neko doko de hirotte kita no?
Where’d you pick that femme up?

Suzuko wa tsuyoi onna no koto suki ja nai no. Nenne ga suki nan da yo.
Suzuko’s not into butch women, she likes femmes.

69 is ainame, ‘mutual licking’.

Atashi-tachi mo nagai aida ainame shiatterun dakedo, saiko yo ne! Anta yattara ii no ni!
We’ve been going down on each other for years! It’s great, you should try it!

Kai is a poetic name for a woman’s vulva, literally meaning ‘shell’. Kaiawase, literally ‘meeting shells’, a Japanese game of putting shells together, is used for lesbian sex.

Chotto uwasa ni yoru to, aitsu no okusan tonari no onna to kaiawase shiteru rashii.
There are rumors that his wife’s bumping pussy with the woman next door.

Kono bideo suge kaiawase yatten no mieru ze!
This video shows some super cunt-grinding!

Another Japanese slang term for dyke is esu, the English letter S, which stands for “sister.” It seems a lot of Japanese slang is English-based.

Ano ko-tachi itsumo beta beta shiteru kara, kitto esu yo!
Those two girls are always all over each other, they must be lezzies!

Anta-tachi esu ja nai no?
You girls are gay, right?

Source: Japanese Street Slang by Peter Constantine (New York & Tokyo: Tengu Books, 1992), p. 42, 137-140.

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I definitely never knew that much Japanese.

I’ve heard “dyke” used as a verb in English, too.

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How’s this for coincidence… I just posted this OP today, and tonight I watch a rerun of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Saw an episode involving a Japanese lesbian. A real neko.

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A femme lesbian on television? The dickens, you say!

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I think that should say “Watashi rezu yo!” But it could be an informal form or something I’m not aware of.

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It’s an ultra-feminine bimbo form - think about a girl fluttering her eyelashes and squeaking as she says it. Yuk.

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Whilst interesting, especially since I used to live in Japan, I’m just curious why you posted this language lesson?

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[HIJACK]This reminds me of something that happened to me a few years ago. I was working in a library in a small college town in Georgia a few years ago. One of our student workers, Mekito, was a student from Japan and one of her best friends was a very cute, pudgy bottle-blonde student from Korea but raised in Japan. (Though in Georgia, the school had as many Asian students [Asian-Asian, not Asian-American] as it did black students.)

One night they were talking and giggling and sometimes looking at me. When I walked past Mekito asked "Sonatan- " [or something close, for my first name- Jonathan] “this is my friend Kim.” I smiled and said hello and she giggled and LITERALLY did the hand over mouth thing. “She want to know if there is girl you like to see and if not do you want to see movie?”

I started with an 'Oh…ah… no… but… there…"

“Oh, do not worry… the school do not mind if student date professor. Kim has dated professor before, as long as she not in his class.”

“Well um… thanks… I’m flattered… but… I… uh… it’s… well… there’s something…”

“Oh, do not worry. Kim like older men.”

I’m thinking “well thank you there, Pear Blossom, for making me feel awkward and old”, but just said “I thank you, but I…”

“You do not think Kim pretty?”

“I think Kim very pretty, but… I have…”

“You not like Asian girl…”

By now I’m blushing, and trying to figure out how to just say it, but Mekito didn’t speak very good English except for when she wanted to, and that wasn’t always, and… then I seen a look of epiphany cross her face and she says

“Oh! Sorry! Hee hee hee…” (again with the hand over the mouth) and she says something to Kim and I only recognized two words.

“xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx xxx xxxx Sonatan xxx xxxxxx x xxxx xxx x homoseku xxx xxxx xxx, hee hee hee hee!”

I understand this is actually not the usual word for gay, but it was understood at least. And if I’m ever in Tokyo and I’ll know how to introduce and tell a little about myself. [/HIJACK]

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Ok after reading Sampiro’s, post I think he should be sorry! Sorry for making me laugh so hard my face hurts! Oww…hehe “homoseku” hehehe…ow…

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Sampiro, I believe you would score even more points by introducing yourself as a “homodachi.” As is “homo” from “homosexual” and “dachi” from “tomodachi” (friend). A gay Japanese couple I knew just about died laughing the first time I used homodachi around them.

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This is MPSIMS. The P stands for “pointless,” therefore no rhyme or reason is called for here. A Doper need never justify a post in MPSIMS as one must in, say, Great Debates. The letters IMS stand for “I must share,” i.e. I’m bursting to unleash these charming factoids on the public. For no particular reason.

See, I was in the private blog of my lesbian group and one of the Nigerian sistas asked how to say dyke in French because she’d just met a French-speaking guy from Africa. The others said ask Johanna, she’s a linguist. So I looked it up and reported that the French word for dyke is gouine (sounds almost like “queen”). Then, you know me, I didn’t stop there but went on to other languages.

Dyke in Classical Arabic is sihaqiyah.

I was disappointed that so many language dictionaries ignored lesbianism and gaydom, the prudes. The dictionaries that do have it only give the formal, literary terms. For example, in Russian it’s lesbiyanka. In Italian, saffica (Sapphic). What about popular slang? I don’t want to go around talking like a dictionary. I only had one slang book, which I’d found at a library used book sale: Japanese Street Slang, so I got that out and had a lot of fun with it.

I discovered also that in Persian, they use the word tabaq for lesbianism. Literally, tabaq means ‘dish’ and by extension a woman’s vulva and lesbianism. The verbal phrase tabaq zadan (literally ‘hit the dish’) means to have lesbian sex. I found this in Steingass’s 19th-century Persian-English Dictionary, which is replete with the classical literary language from 800 years ago, the words used by great poets like Hafiz and Rumi. Since Classical Arabic and Persian have these words, clearly many centuries ago Islamic civilization was less prudish than today and these topics were openly discussed.

This goes for classical Hindu civilization as well. Thanks to a postcard from SLAAAP (Sexually Liberated Art Activist Asian People), I found that the Sanskrit word for “erotic bonding between females” is sakhyani. They made a pun on this: “Sakhyani, suck yoni.” :wink:

Another SLAAAP card, the one with a totally hot Indian woman in a red-and-gold blouse, has bilingual text on the back in English and Tamil. How did they write the word “dyke” in Tamil? They just used the English word “lesbian” transliterated into Tamil script. (I can read Tamil writing.) This suggests that the Tamil language simply doesn’t have a word of its own for it! They had to use the English word.

Which reminds me of how often throughout history the powers that be have simply denied that lesbianism even exists.

Sampiro, LOL! What a great story! Homoseku! :o According to Japanese Street Slang, for male gays they also say gei or gei-boi (from English, of course). Hey, maybe this is how the queer spelling “boi” got started!

Sumimasen! Moyori no gei kurabu wa doko ni arimasu ka?
Excuse me! Where is the nearest gay club?

Ken wa okama ja nai kedo, shigoto de gei boi to shite hataraiterun da.
Ken’s not really a faggot, he just works at a drag bar.

Clubs will have signs saying:
Gei boi-san-tachi to enjoi shite kudasai.
Please enjoy yourself with the Mr. Gay Boys.

matt_mcl will like this one if he ever goes to Japan: Femme gay guys are called gei-chikku. The ending comes from the word romanchikku (English “romantic”).

Gei-chikku na yatsu.
A faggoty dude.

Gei-chikku na kaminoke.
A faggoty hairstyle.

Leather/bondage queers are called hado gei (“hard gay”) or hado koa (“hardcore”).

Ano futari no hado koa, ittai dotchi ga dotchi de yarun daro?
Those two butch fags, I wonder who fucks who?

Also from the SLAAAP cards, I learned that the Urdu expression for “gay” is hamjins parasti, a phrase from Persian literally meaning ‘same-sex orientation’.

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[hijack hijack] Did this college’s name start with A? And was it in a town beginning with C? went there in 96 [/hijack hijack]

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Thanks. I was just curious. actually found your reply quite interesting…

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No, but I know the one you’re talking about (very pretty building, though I always wondered how the students tolerated living in such a tiny town). This was a public college with a major Asian exchange program.

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Not in common language; lesbica is used instead. Saffica could be used as a high-falutin’ metaphor, I suppose. I never saw it used, though. Newspapers and other mass-media often just use omosessuale.

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Let me add some more detail. Saffica is not used to mean “homosexual woman”; it doesn’t mean dyke, in short. It is used as an adjective in a literary context, such as poesia saffica (“sapphic poetry”), and it doesn’t generically mean “lesbian poetry”, but more like “in the style of Sappho”.

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The Indonesian word for a queer is banci, pronounced bahn-chee.

The fairies in Jakarta would stand on the street corners, making wierd, trilling yells at passing motorists. This is how they let anyone who was out trolling know that they were available. Apparently, the comment was apparently made that they were “wailing like banshees” and once it was explained, the Indonesians started using the word banci (the closest they could come to banshee) to describe the yelling fairies. It then moved into the language as a generic term, similar to queer or fairy in English.

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In Spain, the word for dyke is “una bollera” (a woman who makes buns) or, for short, “una bollo.” (“Un bollo” is a bun, but it can also mean lesbian sex.)

La Virgén del Pilar me ha dicho
Que quiere ser lesbiana
Y hacerse un bollito
Con la Montse catalana.

  • Highly blasphemous Spanish lesbian protest chant
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Besides that, Spain has some fantastic queer slang. (I don’t know what part of this is applicable to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world.)

As we probably all know, “marica” (and its derivatives “maricón” and “mariquita”) mean a gay man. They are usually insulting when said by a straight person but not by a gay person. There’s also “mariposa,” literally “butterfly”. “Mari-” is an amazingly productive affix, which you can use with just about any other word: marimacho, marirrevolución, marifiesta, maricontrol (control queen), maripoppins (one who uses poppers - no, I’m not making this up), etc. Amazingly, a handbag used by a man is, in standard Spanish, a “mariconera” – basically a literal calque of “fag bag”! “Mariconear” is to queen it up.

“Pluma” is another very useful word: literally “feather,” it means swishiness, queeniness, flamboyance. “Tener pluma” is to be a queen, or a “plumera.” Wonderfully, “plumón” can mean ostentatious butchness.

“Ambiente” means the gay world, the gay scene; “un lugar de ambiente” is a place for gay people, e.g. a gay bar.

Finally, my favourite one is the verb “entender,” which literally means to understand, but in slang means to be gay. A fantastic T-shirt I saw (but which unfortunately wasn’t my size) said, “¿Entiendes? O te lo explico” (Do you “understand,” or do I have to explain it to you?)

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¡Holá, matt! That’s terrific information. ¡Muchas gracias! That’s the sort of linguistics I like to see around here. Anyone else?

*The Virgin of Pilar told me
She wants to be a dyke
And have lesbian sex
With the Catalan … *

Um, what’s a Montse?