To add to this, in Japanese, you will often refer to someone by their last name + an honorific, so unless you already know the gender of the person, you will not know based on the words used if, for example, a teacher is male or female. Because you might start the conversation by using name + title (e.g. Ishida Sensei), and then continue using the title for the rest of the conversation (e.g. Sensei said such and such and did Such and Such). There might be some indication based on the content of the conversation, but no feature of the language that will explicitly indicate one gender or another.
Japanese is complex. As noted, Japanese tend to use the title for a person throughout a conversation which is another reason why pronouns are not used as frequently.
However, there is also the added complexity of honorifics and how they are used for members of your own group when addressing people either inside or outside of the group. Titles are seen as honorifics and are not used when referring to the person outside the organization.
Another teacher would use the teacher’s name without honorifics in conversations with outsiders. (Ishida said such and such and such.) Note that would be extremely rude to refer to people outside of your group without honorifics.
In contrast, the pronouns for “I” are often explicitly gendered. While watashi / watakushi (私) is gender neutral but not commonly used in casual conversations. boku (僕) is a soft masculine pronoun, while (俺) is the hard-masculine form. Women can say atashi and women (often younger women) or girls will use their own name.
“Female speech” is very different than “male speech” so the gender of the speaker is very clear when reading a dialogue. One danger facing foreign speaker learning Japanese is mimicking the speech patterns of an opposite gender significant other. I had a Japanese teacher force me to learn to speak “like a man” after living with my Japanese ex-wife for several years. OTOH, an Uyghur friend started sounding progressively more and more masculine after marrying her Japanese husband.
In Mandarin, he, she and it are all spoken with the same sound “ta”, though written with different characters.
However in my experience, people whose first language does include gendered pronouns also often confuse “he” and “she”. I think those two consonants are not as distinct in some languages, or just having two very similar words both frequently used is bound to be error prone.
Imagine there was a language where “Cha” meant “he” and “ha” meant “she”. The probability of me frequently getting this wrong is 0.999 recurring.
I have heard from interpreting colleagues that it can be really confusing when a woman interpreter works for two men (or the other way around, of course). She is a woman, but she speaks in the name of a man. If she speaks like a woman, she is not conveying what the man said like the man he is, but if she speaks like a man the japanese listener will be irritated. I wonder to what degree this is really so or whether my colleages were spinning a yarn.
In English, we generally call a dog a ''dog" - whether it’s male or female (the term “bitch” is more likely to be used by breeders for a female, rather than by the general public. There’s no real other term for a male other than “dog”). In French, you have “le chien” and “la chienne” - clearly male and female. Likewise for “cat” - rarely do you see “tom” and “queen” to distinguish male and female (French uses “le chat” and “la chatte”).
The use of boku is not quite as much of an indicator of masculine speech as it once was, as young women are using it more and more. And some personal pronouns considered more male or female have changed through time because they are not inherently gendered.
Here is an article that discuses the topic in depth:
I first noticed that my Filipina friend would often switch he and she. When I asked her why, she said that in Tagalog, there’s no gender specific term as explained in the Wiki.
Since then, I’ve noticed this occurs with many Asian native speakers. Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean.
And, confusingly for Tagalog speakers, the ungendered pronoun “siya” is pronounced “sha” and so sounds a bit like “she”. In my experience I’ve found that Tagalog speakers tend to say “she” where they should say “he”, rather than vice-versa, probably because of the sound similarity.
That reminds me: there is a gendered pronoun in Hebrew that sounds reasonably close to “he”, referring to a female. I can’t say Israelis are known for mixing up English pronouns more than other people, though?
I have always found the changes in Japanese society during the 40 years since I first lived there to be fascinating, and the various trends are fascinating as well as the changes to the language.
I asked my Japanese friends about this. Most of them are in their 40s or 50s and most have children. Pretty much the reaction was that they have heard of younger people using it, but said it was rare.
One friend runs a judo dojo and has three daughters, ages 18, 16 and 12 who do judo. He said that the girls doing judo are not the type which uses boku and he himself hasn’t heard it, although it has gotten press.
I did find a reference in Japanese which linked to a study which found that among girls attending public junior high schools in Kanagawa prefecture, 1.2% used boku and 3.8% used ore, with about 5% using these masculine pronouns. While that’s about 4.999% more than were used in the 1980s when I was first there, it’s not really mainstream yet.
The author of the article you linked notes that they work in a creative field, and that conventional rules are less likely to be followed. That matches my experience in corporate Japan with interactions with people in creative fields.
Oh, I agree that it is not mainstream, though I have heard it in conversation before while at 飲み会 (drinking parties) in Japan. Or at least I think I did, the alcohol may have altered my memory. My main point is that the word itself has no inherent gender meaning but is simply through convention used mostly by males, but can be used by members of either sex.
Does this apply to in-laws? We don’t really have a way of specifying, for example, if someone is my brother’s wife or my wife’s sister. They would both be a sister-in-law. Does Farsi have a better way of making that distinction?
For illustration: I have a sister. I also have a brother, who has a wife. Sister-in-law is used for all these relationships in English: my wife to my sister, my sister to my wife, my wife to my brother’s wife, my brother’s wife to my wife.
In Farsi, there are multiple terms for these relationships: There’s a word for “my husband’s sister,” and a different word for “my brother’s wife,” meaning my wife and my sister would use different words to describe their relationship to the other. And there is yet another word for “the wives of two brothers” which she and my brother’s wife would use for each other.
