In Japanese, Politeness is Directly Encoded into the Grammar

When I was first exposed to honorific speech — keigo — my teacher told us that in her many years of teaching Japanese, she had encountered some students who resisted speaking it because it was “anti-egalitarianism.”

In a sense, they are not wrong. Social hierarchy is implicit in the Japanese language. As if the Japanese language wasn’t difficult enough with all the messy writing systems and — the Japanese language grammatically encodes for social hierarchy!

To speak the Japanese language is to understand your role within a larger social drama. Personal pronouns, verb conjugations, and even the verbs themselves might change depending on the situation and who the listener is.

So, what is my solution for understanding politeness and how it functions in the Japanese language? The answer is simple. Don’t skip your grammar lessons!