Japanese Honorific Language in Various Domains

要旨

Language belongs to human. In a communication, human as language owner may position themselves as messenger (speaker), message recipient (interlocutor) or as a person who is the object of speech (object of conversation). In Japanese speech community, human must implement their position in communication based on honorific language usage principle. They must proficiently choose language with regard to lexical and grammatical concerns, as well as consider social factor underlying the communication. Expressions human use in Japanese honorific language principle significantly influences the convenience of communication, as the determinant whether or not they are acceptable in the community. This study will analyze Japanese honorific language journey by domains. Honorific language (known as keigo) first appears in the literary work Genji Monogatari. Its language choice and sentence patterns show their difference with common/neutral language, particularly to specialize the language referred to the Emperor. The next domain is family, in which Japanese quite differently calls their own family (uchi) from other's family (soto), but this shifts along with time. The education domain differentiates the language referred to student and teacher. This also takes place in business/office domain, in which language is quite differently used based on one's position in a company. Due to the religious domain, human being as the servants of Allah show their respect to the Creator by praising Allah through a respectful language contained in Al Quran which is translated into Japanese language as the realization of Islamic followers to communicate with Allah (habluminallah).

主題