Excerpt from Babel by Gaston Dorren, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Japanese is different. Grammatical gender is for all intents and purposes non-existent. What we find in Japanese is that women and men are expected to speak slightly different 'genderlects' – varieties based on gender. This is not some marginal phenomenon, not one of those surprise nuances that linguists sometimes discover after diving deep into the inner workings of any language. In Japanese society, onna kotoba, joseigo or fujingo – all three words translate as 'women's language' – is considered a separate part of the national language, and the cultural establishment sets considerable store by maintaining it.

So what has history been up to here? How has it produced a special women's variety? What distinguishes this variety from – well, from what actually? From men's language? Or is there also a neutral, ungendered variety?

To begin with this last question: most of the language, indeed nearly all of it, is considered neutral. (This puts us in mind of ngoko, the basic register of Javanese, most of which is neither polite nor impolite.) But beyond this, there are separate varieties, both for women and for men. Yet there is an important difference. Men's language, which has a rude, forceful ring to it, is nearly entirely optional, and boys will not be taught to speak it. Rather, they pick it up, much like children elsewhere may pick up street slang. Women's language, on the other hand, is not so optional, and parents and teachers will do their best to make girls toe the linguistic line. But that implies that the 'ungendered' Japanese is in fact no such thing: part of it is the reserve of men, who, moreover, have a special register at their disposal that is particularly masculine. Women's individual options are limited to either conforming to the appropriate genderlect or attracting social censure – in other words, they have to obey or pay the price. Collectively, of course, they have an additional option: once sufficient numbers are willing to flout the rules, the whole concept of women's language will become less rigid. And this is exactly what has happened in recent decades, as we will see later.

Luncheon is on the tableon

Let's get down to brass tacks. What makes women's Japanese different from men's? For starters, women are more likely to use slightly longer versions of words to make them – and consequently themselves – sound polite. Think of it as not only using the archaic word 'luncheon' instead of the workaday 'lunch', but making the difference systematic by also saying 'tableon' instead of 'table' and 'flowereon' instead of 'flower'. In Japanese, this politeness syllable is added not at the end, but at the front: thus hana ('flower') becomes ohana (both in speech and in writing).

Next, women and men will use different pronouns to refer to themselves: while watashi is a word for 'I' or 'me' that both genders can use (though it sounds rather formal when a man says it), atashi is clearly a women's word, while boku is for men that are – or want to come over as – young. Indeed, atashi and boku are what Japanese-language textbooks teach (young people) for the first person singular, just as English-language textbooks teach he and she in the third person. Similar differences exist in the case of the second person pronoun, 'you'.

The verb 'to be', da, is differentiated along gender lines as well. In a sentence like 'this is a spider', men will use it, but women will omit it. In other words, men say something like 'this is a spider', whereas the same sentence in women's Japanese is more like 'this a spider'. The point is not that the latter sounds strange in English – a sentence like 'this a spider' is perfectly fine in many languages, including Russian (see chapter 3). What matters is that women and men apply different grammar here.

They will also use different 'little words' of the kind that don't have clearly definable meanings, but suggest the speakers' attitudes. These words are highly frequent in Japanese, adding all sorts of Japanese women didn't always use deferential language. This is Izumi Shikibu, one of the great poets of the Kyoto court, who wrote a series of passionate love poems in the early eleventh century. subtexts, ranging from 'please agree with me' and 'we both know' all the way to 'I'm positive, damn it'. Both men and women can use ā for 'oh', as in 'oh, how beautiful', but only women may also choose ara or mā. To express 'I wonder', women will say ka shira, whereas ka na is more neutral. A particularly well-known example is the feminine wa, which expresses admiration or emotion; men are highly unlikely to use it.

Excerpted from Babel by Gaston Dorren. Copyright © 2018 by Gaston Dorren. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.