Language and Culture

The Concept of Group Identity

By コトバ君 ・ Japanese Honorifics ・ ~6 min read

We’ve already seen that Japanese has a strong tendency to make relationships clear in language.

This doesn’t just happen at the individual level (speaker/addressee) but is also crucial at the group level.

Speakers constantly negotiate:

○ their relationships as individuals; and

○ their position as members of a group

The key concept here is called uchi–soto in Japanese, but can be thought of as group identity.

Group identity, is made up of:

○ uchi ウチ – in-group (lit. “inside”)

○ soto ソト – out-group (lit. “outside”)

Native speakers share cultural knowledge about: how group identity works, and when it needs to be made clear in language.

Acquiring the ability to navigate group identity is essential because once group identity is verbalised, it not only reflects our view of relationships at that moment but is also used to construct relationships.

This is why language that goes against established group norms or others’ expectations, can have a negative effect on the interaction and the relationship.

Dynamic, Yet Precise

Group identity reflects:

○ interpersonal relations; and,

○ context

Like honorifics, group identity is dynamic and changes from moment to moment.

That doesn’t mean in-group/out-group distinctions are weak. On the contrary:

To form an in-group, there must be a notable unifying factor that leads the speaker to identify with other participants.

Few example, in a business meeting, with an outside company, the notable factor is company membership:

○ people from the speaker’s company = in-group

○ people from another company = out-group

When talking to a colleague or friend, the notable factor is often family membership:

○ the speaker’s family = in-group

○ anyone outside the family = out-group

In-group is often formed in opposition to someone outside that group – a kind of “us vs them”. A speaker may belong to a football team and feel that the notable factor is being a member of that team speaking about their team-mates as an-group. Or they may belong to a school, in which case the notable factor is being a student at that school.

Anchoring the in-group

The anchor point of in-group is always the speaker.

This is why uchi ウチ can be used as a first person pronoun meaning ‘I’.

It also highlights that group identity is about language. It is a grammatical requirement about how events are framed in Japanese and is not evidence of Japanese group psychology or collectivism.

Speakers treat in-group members as extensions of themselves linguistically.

This has an important consequence:

For example:

○ There is a vertical relationship between “me” and “my boss”.

○ But when I treat my boss as in-group (“we” as a company), that vertical difference is ignored at that moment and no honorifics are appropriate.

It makes sense: in-group members are treated as a single entity with the speaker and a speaker cannot have a hierarchical relationship with themselves.

While I have reduced or eliminated distance with my boss, this doesn’t mean in-group members are automatically psychologically closer.

My relationship with my colleague doesn’t improve magically just because we now share an out-group to contrast with.

From this, we can infer:

Closeness is not the same thing as group identity.

As soon as the context changes, the distance with my boss that had been on pause will resume.

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