The pronoun /dìchǎn/ is also perceived by both women and kathoey as a pronoun for formal settings. This is importaht because this term is rarely used as a solely femininity-indexing pronoun. For example, both groups agreed that the use of pronoun /nǔː/ create a sense of humbleness, making the speaker sound more adorable. The participants, 17 kathoey and 19 women, perceive the uses and social meanings of personal pronouns in correspondence with the online corpora dataset. This analysis is confirmed by results from a questionnaire designed to obtain perception of the self-reference terms’ social meanings. Nevertheless, the full form and its reduced variant /dían/ and /dán/, which are usually associate with high-class people, are still used both by women and kathoey as a way to mock the high-class people’s speech.įrom the data, we could see the process of kathoey’s reinterpretation of the social meaning and stances previously tied up with feminine personal pronouns, which, subsequently, functions as a part of their gender identity construction. The choice avoids implication of power difference or seniority and expresses informal femininity rather than formal or elite sense of femininity. Pavadee found that the pronoun /dìchǎn/, which is infrequently used among women to index eliteness, femininity, formality and empathic stance, making their words sound more convincing, is reinterpreted and constantly used by kathoey as an unmarked personal pronoun. Using the pronoun /nǔː/ among other kathoey, they index themselves as younger and less experienced and imply a power asymmetry between the speakers.įurthermore, Dr. In contrast, the pronoun /nǔː/ used by kathoey does not always presuppose an affective or intimate stance. The pronoun /nǔː/ used by women often tend to exhibit an affective or intimate stance. While epicene personal pronouns which do not specify gender of speaker are the most-frequently used pronouns in all of the website, the data show that feminine pronouns are widely used in TLB (26.45%), in contrast with Jeban & Pantip (3.13%).Įspecially revealing is the finding that both women and kathoey use the same feminine pronouns but the stances exhibited were differently taken. The self-reference terms from the online corpora data include personal pronouns, personal names, kin terms, combination of kin terms and personal name, and the fixed phrase ‘the post owner’, with personal pronouns as the most used. The last one is the beauty section from Pantip, Thai people’s Reddit-like online community. The second website is Jeban, which is a website about women’s beauty trends. The first one is Thai, a transgender community website in Thailand especially for kathoey. Pavadee the writer explore the use of self-reference terms on three online websites. Nevertheless, there are cases in which the speaker’s uses of personal pronouns and self-reference terms do not directly point at the gender identity he/she wants to represent.ĭr. For example, using the Thai 1 st person masculine pronoun /pʰǒm/ implies that the speaker wishes to align himself with the “male” section of the gender spectrum. Personal pronouns and self-reference terms in many languages are considered a direct way to represent or identify one’s gender identity. Pavadee Saisuwan addresses how such limited resources can play such an important role in constituting gender identity, which is limitless? In her article on linguistic construction of gender in Thai society that appeared in Language, sexuality and power: Studies in intersectional sociolinguistics, Dr. Because thai does not make use of overt markers such as suffixes to index the gender, one of the very few linguistic resources that the speaker can use for constructing their gender identity are self-reference terms such as /pʰǒm/, /nǔː/, and /dìchǎn/. The word kathoey in Thai refers to male-to-female transgenders who uses several aspects of femininity to identify themselves as male-to-female transgender.
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