Looking at Gender Stereotypes in Language Behaviour: Questions, Compliments, and Interruptions in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki

Sammanfattning: The films of Hayao Miyazaki have been praised world-wide for their strong female characters and their wide range of gender representation. While most of previous research has been focusing on narrative, in particular, characters’ social behaviour therein, or their visual appearance, this thesis aims to understand whether these praised films do challenge the usual gender stereotypes associated with contemporary Japanese society and popular fiction also linguistically. Specifically, it focuses on questions, compliments, and interruptions in a quantitative analysis examining the frequency of tagged language behaviour in female and male main characters. The results show that language behaviour associated with gender stereotypes – not only with regard to the Japanese society but the whole world – can be seen in the analysed films Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). For a more complex understanding of the linguistic stereotypes in the films, this thesis argues that further research on the Japanese language and Japanese gender norms would be required.