Lund Circle of East Asian Linguistics (LCEAL) seminar

Title: Female Villain Language: Gendered Patterns Explored Through a Corpus-based Approach to Role Language Research

Speaker: Jahnesta Sjöberg

Jahnesta Sjöberg will present his recently defended MA thesis.

The thesis is available from LUP Student Papers (opens in a new window).

If you want to attend the talk via Zoom, please register in advance for this meeting (opens in a new window).

 

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Abstract

This study examines the linguistic characteristics of the speech of female villains in Japanese fictional dialogue, with the aim of determining whether female villains employ a distinct role language or yakuwarigo, that is, a distinct speech style that indexes characterization based on social stereotypes. An original, small-scale corpus was constructed consisting of dialogue from female villains, male villains, and female protagonists (heroines). Each group contains three characters drawn from films and television series with approximately 70-80 utterances per character. The corpus was manually annotated for linguistic features commonly associated with role language, including first- and second-person pronouns, verb conjugation, sentence-final elements, and gender-coded forms. Quantitative comparison of feature distributions across groups was complemented by qualitative analysis of marked forms.

The results indicate that female villains do not exhibit a fixed speech style comparable to established role languages. Instead, female villain speech displays considerable intra-group variation and is characterized by a strategic combination of feminine-coded and masculine-coded forms. In particular, female villains avoid masculine forms in self-reference but adopt them frequently for second-person reference and occasionally for imperatives and negations. In contrast, male villains and heroines show more internally consistent patterns.

These findings suggest that female villains do not constitute a distinct role language in the traditional sense but rather make flexible use of socially typified linguistic forms for characterization. On this basis, the study argues for a refinement of the conceptual framework of role language and proposes an approach that emphasizes dynamic indexicality and contextual interpretation of static form-category links, as inspired by gendered language research.