Understanding Japan Through First and Second Pronouns

In the book Startide Rising by David Brin, humans have bio-engineered dolphins to be intelligent, and modified their spaceships so dolphin crews can work alongside humans in space. In the book, one dolphin remarks how amusing it is that humans bother to hide their feelings from members of the opposite sex; the sonar capabilities of dolphins allow them to see the internal changes in other dolphins and tell if one is interested in them physically, so there are never any secrets about who likes who. It was an interesting concept, and one that I sometimes think about in the context of Japan. In Japanese, people use different first- and second-person pronouns depending on how they perceive themselves and others, which sometimes betrays their intentions and their insecurities. For the pronoun "I" you could choose from watashi (formal, used more often by women), boku (semi-polite, usually used by younger males), and ore (OH-reh, mainly used by "manly" men); words for "you" include anata (formal, used by women more often than men); kimi (familiar, used by guys to their girlfriends or by anyone talking to a younger person); and omae (oh-MAH-eh, again, a "macho" sounding word generally used by males). This last word is especially interesting since it basically asserts the superiority of the speaker over the person he's addressing, a concept that doesn't exist in English. When a man uses the word omae to a female he's in a relationship with, the implication is that the girl "belongs to" him in a romantic sense, but a male using the word in other situations might indicate wishful thinking about how he wants others to view him. By paying attention to what pronouns people use, you can catch which guys are trying to act tougher than they feel and which girls are pretending to be more feminine than they are.

Most Japanese males will use the second person pronoun omae to show how manly they are.