The position of things (far away, nearby) and their role in the current interaction (goods, addresser, addressee, bystander) are features of the meaning of those words.
The use of pronouns, especially when referring to oneself and speaking in the first person, vary between gender, formality, dialect and region where Japanese is spoken.
[1][2][3][4] Among Japanese grammarians, whether pronouns should be considered a distinct part of speech (品詞, hinshi) has varied.
In addition, Japanese pronouns are restricted by a situation type (register): who is talking to whom about what and through which medium (spoken or written, staged or in private).
[12][13] As functionalists point out, however, these words function as personal references, demonstratives, and reflexives, just as pronouns do in other languages.
[14][15] Japanese has a large number of pronouns, differing in use by formality, gender, age, and relative social status of speaker and audience.
[17] Japanese words that refer to other people are part of the encompassing system of honorific speech and should be understood within that context.
Pronoun choice depends on the speaker's social status (as compared to the listener's) as well as the sentence's subjects and objects.
[citation needed] Thus, in sentences comprising a single adjective (often those ending in -shii), it is often assumed that the speaker is the subject.
[18] Thus, the first-person pronoun is usually not used unless the speaker wants to put a special stress on the fact that they are referring to themselves or if it is necessary to make it clear.
If it is required to state the second person, the listener's surname, suffixed with -san or some other title (like "customer", "teacher", or "boss"), is generally used.
[33] The third-person feminine pronoun, kanojo (彼女), had not existed until sometime around the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji era.
[5][34] 彼女 started out as a mere shortened spelling of the phrase ka-no wonna (かのをんな), which could be spelt in full as 彼の女, literally simply means "that female person," and is composed of the genitive form of kare, ka-no, and the noun wonna (now onna).
Although not being a pronoun in a lexicographic sense, this phrase can be used pronominally like modern expressions such as a-no hito (あの人, lit.
[35][36][37][38][39][f][40][g][41][h][42][43][44] The earliest exception was the 1876 dictionary Kaisei Syougaku Tokuhon Zibiki (改正小學讀本字引)[34] by 田中𦤺知, which listed KA-NO ZYO Mukau-ni wiru musume (彼女 ムカウニヰルムスメ, lit.
[45][i] It has been suggested that the editor may have simply used ka-no zyo (now kanojo) for novelty back when jo (女) was still commonly used as a free noun.
[59][60][61] The phrase ka-no wonna (and its alternative ka-no zyo) rose to prominence due to Meiji writers' need to translate third-person feminine pronouns in European languages,[34] such as she and her in English or elle and elles in French, which they eventually incorporated into their own writings.
Kanojo, as a lexicalized pronoun, was first attested in literature in its written furigana-glossed form as kanozyo (彼女)[71] in the 1885 novel Tousei Syosei Katagi (當世書生気質) by Tsubouchi Shōyō.
Kanojo eventually acquired its status as a lexicalized noun meaning "girlfriend" during the late Taishō era.
[5][34] The third-person masculine pronoun kareshi (彼氏) was coined during the early Shōwa era as an alternative to the once-gender-neutral kare (彼) and as the opposite to the feminine kanojo (彼女).
Its first written attestation as a pronoun is attributed to Tokugawa Musei's 1929 essay collection Mandanshū (漫談集);[77][78] as a noun meaning "boyfriend," to Nagai Kafū's 1934 novel Hikage-no Hana (ひかげの花).
[77][79] Morphologically, kareshi (彼氏) is composed of the aforementioned demonstrative-turned-personal pronoun kare (彼) and -shi (氏), the latter of which is an honorific suffix to names,[77][78] mostly male names,[78] and can be translated as "Mr."[80] Kareshi was often used in a tongue-in-cheek way;[77] compare the masculine and self-aggrandizing ore-sama (俺様),[29] which also consists of a pronoun (ore (俺, "I/me")) and an honorific suffix (-sama (様)).