Person Reference Terms

Introduction to Person Reference Terms

~5 min read

Why Learn Person Reference Terms?

Person reference terms belong to the must-have Essential Japanese.

They’re essential for:

○ Communicating meaning

○ Negotiating relationships

The Basics

Communicating Meaning

These words make it clear whether we’re talking about:

○ ourselves (the speaker)

○ the person we’re talking to (the addressee)

○ someone not present in the conversation (the referent)

Sometimes you need to clarify who you’re asking a question of, or who you’re making a statement about.

And sometimes you just need to get someone’s attention. For instance:

“Paul!”

“Ma’am! I think you dropped something…”

Negotiating Relationships

As Alice’s example demonstrated, when it comes to talking about people in Japanese, these terms are loaded with social meaning. Your choice shows how you evaluate the relationship.

They communicate what you think about the relationship right now. For example:

○ Is the person you’re talking to or about a stranger or a friend?

○ Are they deserving of respect, or not?

But it doesn’t stop there. Person reference terms also communicate where you want the relationship to go:

○ Do you want to get closer in the relationship?

○ Or do you want to avoid getting closer?

With these terms, any relationship becomes possible: from favourable first impressions, to building, strengthening, or maintaining existing relationships.

And because human relationships are complicated, these terms can also make distancing, rejecting, or destroying relationships possible.

That’s why learning how to refer to ourselves and others is so important: all our relationships are on the line.

Competence

We become proficient in person reference terms in the same way we do with any part of the honorific system.

Step 1: Decoding

This begins with the process of decoding: understanding the social meaning and intentions of others from their language.

To decode person reference terms, we start by developing our awareness:

○ What is the social meaning of this form?

○ What contextual factors do native speakers consider when using it?

For example, we might learn that:

○ omae is one form of the pronoun “you” (language).

○ It is insulting or derogatory (cultural knowledge).

○ However, it can be used between friends as a casual address term or as banter (cultural knowledge). *1

With this combined language and cultural knowledge, we can start making interpretations based on the context, gaining more data each time we encounter the form.

Step 2: Encoding

As we gain confidence, we start the encoding process: choosing terms to express our own social meaning and intentions.

Doing this requires using the person reference term in a way that is identifiable and appropriate to the native-speaking community.

Example

What are Person Reference Terms?

We’re all familiar with person reference terms already, whether we realise it or not.

They’re how we distinguish between:

○ the person speaking

○ the person being spoken to

○ the person being spoken about

The key is to understand person.

What Does “Person” Mean?

You’re not the first person to ask what “person” means. To put it simply, person is just a label for who’s being talked about.

Grammatical person describes three kinds of situations:

○ 1st person: the speaker talks about themself (or a group that includes them).

○ 2nd person: the speaker talks directly to the listener (“you”) or listeners (“you guys”).

○ 3rd person: the speaker talks to the listener about someone/something else (not the speaker, not the listener).

When You’ll Actually Use This (A Lot)

In English, several kinds of words can change depending on the grammatical person.

First off, pronouns:

And secondly, verbs:

See how the verb go changes to goes in the 3rd person singular.

So what about Japanese?

Well, in Japanese too, there are several kinds of words that can change depending on the grammatical person.

For example, pronouns:

What Terms Are There?

In this module, we’ll cover:

○ Pronouns

e.g. watashi 私 (“I”), anata あなた (“you”)

○ Names

e.g. Tanaka-san 田中さん (name + title)

○ Position & job titles

e.g. buchō 部長 (“department chief”), kachō 課長

○ Professional titles

e.g. sensei 先生

○ Kinship terms

e.g. chichi 父 (“father”), obāsan おばあさん (“grandma”)

○ Demonstratives used like “you”

e.g. sochira そちら (“you”, lit. “that way/over there”)

We’ll be using person as an organisation tool throughout, helping us keep track of each kind of person reference term we encounter.

A Pattern Across Japanese honorifics

Across Japanese honorifics in general:

○ Terms for self-reference (talking about yourself) are fewer and simpler.

○ Terms for other-reference (talking about others) are more numerous and finer-grained.

○ It’s more important that the speaker talks to the listener (2nd person) than someone else (3rd person).

These three points remind us that how we address the person we’re talking to has a real effect on how our relationship with that person will develop.

In fact, we see the same pattern in verbs: honorific verbs that show respect for others are more numerous and nuanced than honorific verbs that show humility to ourselves. It’s also more important to use respectful verbs with listeners being spoken to directly than to others not present in the conversation.

↑ Top