short video screenshot: https://streamable.com/7qtmep
Is the male or female audio the Tokyo accent? Is he pronouncing it differently cause all males do or is it a dialect?
1 Like
They are both Tokyo dialect speakers.
Just like in your own language male and female speakers will have variation within the same dialects!
2 Likes
I wouldn’t say it’s a male / female difference. It just happens to be that they are doing two different valid pronunciations.
Or, I should say, even if there is a slight discrepancy in the percentage of usage by gender, it’s not like you can’t use one or the other if you are a man or woman.
It’s worth noting that 女子 is often used as a modifier for something else (女子トイレ, 女子バスケットボール, 女子高生) etc. In this case, I don’t think devoicing the し like that is very common. The recording here is just it as a standalone word.
9 Likes
Many way to pronounce this kind of termination.
You have the same with です or ます that you may hear as dess/mass or desu/masu
The S sounds in general seems to be shortened, as in すこし which ir more a skoshi than a sukoshi.
The most tricky I heard was しち (as in 4 7) when counting. I am not able to describe / pronunce it the same way a native once told me, but it wasn’t shichi at all. 
1 Like
I thought しち was 七 i.e. 7? Either way, did it sound like the ‘fast’ version at the end of this video by any chance?
Perhaps I’m being too liberal about this, but I honestly just took it as the male speaker pronouncing the し softly/quickly without much emphasis on the ‘i’. The pitch variations seem to be the same, anyway, and I think that’s more important. Devoicing sometimes ‘just happens’, but often enough both pronunciations are understood, and it’s really just a matter of which is more common.
And you are correct, I got distracted …
The し was more aspirated, that’s ressemble but not exactly. But that’s the idea! thanks.
1 Like
I heard at least 2 versions of いち when doing karate a long time ago - one had a very short ‘i’ sound at the end.
I think I missed this in 女子 or I didn’t play the audio then. Sounds a little weird, yeah.
2 Likes
This is just vowel devoicing, which is very common for I and U vowels when at the end of a word after a voiceless consonant or in-between two voiceless consonants.
6 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.