The Final Particle wa in Japanese - Stereotypes vs. Reality

Summary, in English

The sentence-final particle wa is something that has predominately been taught as a female particle in the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language. However, from the information presented in this thesis it is demonstrated that the sentence-final wa is in fact two separate elements, one kind used by women and the other by men. It is argued that wa should be taught as two different particles united solely by the fact that they are homophones and homographs, but not synonyms; something that should not be a problem since the modern Japanese language is full of similar homographs that represent two or more syntactical elements. Regarding the sentence-final wa used in Japanese dialects I feel it should be disregarded since it does not possess the same syntactic qualities as that of standard Japanese and behaves differently depending on which dialect it is used in. It should either be disregarded, seeing as how it differs to such an extent from the standard language, or be taught separately according to the usage in the different dialects.
A brief walkthrough of the Japanese particle system is presented with focus being placed first on the sentence-final particles (referred to simply as final particles), then on the sentence-final wa and its usage by women, men and in various dialects.

• Author: Alexander Petersson
• Department/s: Japanese Studies
• Publishing year: 2010
• Language: English
• Full text: Available as PDF - 108 kB; Download statistics
• Document type: Student publication for Bachelor's degree
• Topic: Languages and Literatures
• Keywords: Japanese; linguistics; sentence-final; particle; wa; dialect; gender
• Supervisor: Lars Larm