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When people speak Japanese, their gender matters a great deal. A good number of words and grammatical constructions are associated with either women or men. For starters, women are more likely to use slightly longer versions of words that make them—the words, and consequently the speakers—sound polite. Think of it as not only saying the refined word ‘luncheon’ instead of the more 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: hana ‘flower’ becomes ohana.

Next, women and men will use different pronouns to refer to themselves: while watashi is a formal word for ‘I’ or ‘me’ that both genders can use, atashi is clearly a women’s word and ore, boku and oira are men’s. Both genders will use the word for ‘be’ differently: in a sentence like ‘this is a spider’, men will include da for ‘is’ (‘this da a spider’), whereas women will omit it (‘this a spider’). They will use different interjections: for example, ‘Hey, you’ translates as Nē, chotto for women, but as Oi chotto or yō chotto for men; both men and women can use ā where English would have ‘oh’ (as in ‘Oh, how beautiful’), but only women may also choose ara or mā. Men may pronounce the diphthong /ai/ (rhyming with English lie) as /ē/ (rhyming with lay), whereas it would be unladylike for a woman to do so.

Speakers do not exactly break a hard-and-fast grammar rule when using elements normally used by the opposite gender, but they certainly break a social convention: they bend both a rule and their gender.