Are Japanese Women Less Feminine Now? A Study of Sentence-Final Forms in Japanese Women's Conversation

This paper examines the use of sentence-final expressions in naturallyoccurring informal Japanese conversations of women of two different age groups: one, ages 18~21, and the other, ages 44-46. It tests two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Young Japanese women use fewer feminine-sounding sentence-final forms than older Japanese women.