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High Pitched Female Voices and Japanese -
08-18-2010, 06:43 PM
I suppose the language board is as good a place as any to ask this.
I've never thought to ask why so many Japanese women (see the lead actress in 誰も知らない, or YUKI) affect high voices, but my wife recently asked again, so I decided to ask where I thought people might know and be honest. I don't want some third-rate hypothesis by a Japanese major, either: I can come up with simple hypotheses like "oh, cuz of kawaii culture" or "Japanese men are pedophiles," but those are neither satisfying explanations nor trustworthy in and of themselves. I want to know a real answer, not come up with guesses myself that just sound right. I figure there's some sort of studies that have actually been done on this. I googled, but only found guys asking the same question as me and joking about anime and crap like that. In any case, I hope this is language-related enough to stay on this board. 
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08-18-2010, 07:24 PM
What is the question?
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08-18-2010, 08:21 PM
Well, why do so many English speaking women do impersonation of John Wayne? jk.
Are you sure Japanese girls are speaking with "high voice"? YouTube - Avril Lavigne Proactiv Commercial YouTube - プロアクティブボディCM 出演：小倉優子_60秒 For instance, these 2 girls in very similar settings are speaking at about the same pitch.
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08-18-2010, 08:29 PM
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Edit: By "women" I really mean "female entertainers."
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08-18-2010, 08:31 PM
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And before someone suggests that it's genetics, just watch a Kurosawa film and listen to the women speak. You never hear one who sounds like the lead actress in 誰も知らない or innumerable singers and actresses. It's obviously an affectation, not the natural pitch of their voices. japanese girl high voice - Google Search You'll find a lot of pages asking the same question as me, so it's not a hallucination of mine. Nearly all my family has asked at one point or another. My wife (who is ethnically Asian and from South America) has also noticed this and asked. I think her mom and sister have asked as well. I'd finally like to be able to give an answer better than "I dunno, to sound cute." And no, I'm not referring to anime VAs.
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08-18-2010, 08:54 PM
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Every Japanese phoneme has a vowel and it is a pitch accented language so you'll hear voiced phoneme at relatively consistent pitch almost all the time, while in English, there are a lot less vowels in a sentence and they are pronounced with a more explosive way so they die out quickly. That and the girly accent (going up at the end of a sentence) are probably fooling your brains. Exactly what part of that video do you find the girl is "affecting high voice"? P.S. And who is the lead actress in 誰も知らない? is it "YOU"?
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08-18-2010, 09:14 PM
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And I speak English natively and Japanese pretty well; I assure you my brain is not being fooled. It's actually absolutely unfathomable to me that someone would deny this phenomenon exists! And yes, Avril's voice does go higher occasionally when English prosody demands it. But Japanese prosody does not demand a consistently high voice, as regular Japanese girl speech patterns demonstrate. And my conception of "regular Japanese girl" is basically 99% of females I attended university with in Tokyo. Edit Another example: YouTube - MHFシーズン5.0×ファミ通TV 特番 #1 You can't tell me that's natural. Edit 2 Apparently academics are researching this topic, so again, I'm not inventing things out of thin air: Japanese language, gender, and ... - Google Books Edit 3 More research being done: http://global.factiva.com/aa/default.aspx?pp=Print 1 of 2
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08-18-2010, 09:32 PM
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I am a psych grad. though, and I have looked into this kind of thing a little. 1) There are some physiological characteristics at play, i'm sure, in that japanese women generally have slightly lighter voices. An affected voice acts like a hyperbole for femininity. It makes a caricature of 'girl', sometimes for comedic effect, or chiaroscuro-like affect- female villains with sweet voices and evil intentions. 2) Strong social links with higher voices and femininity. Definitely there's evidence that female fluent native-english speakers of Japanese raise their pitch when they swap to Japanese, which male speakers don't do; they remain constant across languages. There's also the phenomenon where female learners of Japanese frequently resist pitch-raising or certain syntax when they start out because they are aware it makes them sound overtly feminine and it doesn't gel with their perceptions of femininity or womanliness. Leading to- 3) The flipside. Male voices in Asia on the whole are slightly less deeply pitched than westerners. Of course you get a proportion of bass voices, but in the media it's got social overtones of samurai and yakuza stereotypes. You don't get a bishounen prince who sounds like Lois Armstrong any more than you'd have a shogun who sounded like Tiny Tim. So if the male role opposite the female role is speaking with only a mid-range pitched voice, the woman needs to raise her pitch in order to maintain a distinct gender gap in terms of the audio. In fact, i'm sure I've seen a couple of samurai flicks where the male lead DID have a deep gravelly voice, and the love interest, rather than pitching her voice up, created contrast by softening her tone instead. 4) Role. Mature or 'cold' women in Japanese dramas don't tend to have squeaky voices. In 君はペットthey even make a point of this; the woman speaks quite normally, the villainess has the affected 'little voice' and as a consequence the protagonist gets told she isn't cute. Outside of drama; if you look at female news-desk readers in Japan they rarely affect a voice, sticking with the Japanese equivalent of a BBC tone throughout, even if what they're saying is relatively bland compared to their male counterparts. This could be for several obvious reasons; they're working with serious subject matter, so a high voice would be inappropriate, they're also acting from a position of authority, to which people most naturally react better if the voice is a mature voice, and thus deeper than normal. The girls they send out to talk to Mr. Tanaka and his hot air ballooning monkey tend to be more chirpy and lighter pitched. 5) What we can perhaps infer from this is that in roles where the individual characteristics of the speaker take a back-seat, including gender in this case, then the hyperbole of an affected voice isn't needed. On the flip-side, in scenarios where the characteristics of the speaker need to be fore-front, a 'voice' can exaggerate them, in the case of a high voice, it exaggerates certain aspects of femininity. It works both ways too, certain male roles often encourage an affectedly lower voice. The contrast is, where lowering of a male voice for affect isn't limited to non-western media (Batman), raising of a female voice to a degree IS. It must be, or else no one would bother to comment on it. 6) Halo Effect. The angelic sort of halo, not the other sort. It's generally accepted that beautiful people are more likely to be attributed with positive characteristics at first impression than ugly people. Similarly, a woman with a higher/lighter voice is given the same deal in Japan. And this I ~have~ read about. A study by Ohara (1996?) found that a higher pitched voice (without any image) was more likely to be attributed as cute, kind, gentle, polite, beautiful, would easily marry and young. Lower voices in contrast were more likely to be attributed as stubborn, selfish, strong, would become spinsters and straight-forward. Ouch. So there's really a big advantage for a girl in the public eye to hype up her dolly voice as depressingly, there was no difference between male and female perceptions in the study; another woman was just as likely to make those negative assumptions as a man. 7) Women's Lib. I hate to drag this into this, but in Japan, it's possible that there is no gain for a woman to lower her pitch, whereas in the West, women have deliberately dropped their tones to compete with men. Maggie Thatcher is a prime example; follow her career from start (pre PM) to finish and you'll see her tone drops by about an octave. She was explicitly coached to do so. So it could well be that Women in the west have normatively lower voices than we used to and you're so used to it that Japanese women seem shrill in comparison. A low woman's voice is also rather sexual, plenty of pop-stars in the west put on a sexy husky don't-care voice because it sells, but in Japan, perhaps that makes you seem too easy or used goods, seeing as 'innocence' is a much bigger seller. 8) Not so much Kawaii as Genki? No one likes a mopey actress; when you are cheerful you naturally lift your voice up, speak higher and more lightly. Perhaps a cheap and easy way to stay seeming genki is just to speak squeak. 9) It's super Japanese. Again looking at foreign female learners of Japanese, you often get amongst the very japanophile types the "gaspy little voicers". Loathed by other foreign women, they affect this voice to sound cute and most importantly, 'japanesey'. They go so far as to take it into English as well, complete with gestures and so forth, because women with high voices are part of the perception of Japan. Conversely, there's often nothing as 'foreign' as a woman with a low-rough voice. It's bold and aggressive and I can tell you, you can make pushy blokes scarper very quickly simply by dropping out of 'cute' pitching It's something of a trend too, perhaps. One famous high-pitcher begats another, and another, and another...
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08-18-2010, 09:37 PM
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Fascinating. I look forward to getting some natives' opinions, too. Maybe I'll go to 2chan and post in Japanese. Though I suspect I'll get more of a "「女の子」ってなんだっけ?!" response there.
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08-18-2010, 09:58 PM
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YouTube - (Nike×YOU) 居てない居てない YOU! 居てたーん Again, she's nothing higher than, say, Paris Hilton, pitch wise. Do you find her voice high in this video also? Quote:
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edit: I'm not "denying" the "phenomenon" exists, I'm just saying it's probably not the pitch itself, but rather their accent. Drawling the end of a sentence and rising its pitch high is a signature of Tokyo young girl accent. Notice 小倉優子 is doing it in pretty much all of the sentences? This doesn't make you look very smart and is rather girly so guys don't do it very much but rising of the pitch at the end of a sentence itself is one legitimate way of emphasizing.
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