Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
OK, I don't know if it's been said or not, but in my experience the high pitched voice is directly linked to the level of politeness.
The higher the pitch, the more polite. Incidentally, this is also quite true for males. Although males aren't expected to go as high as women, which is a gender role thing as much as a physiological thing I'm sure.
At any rate, if you go shopping in Japan, you will notice that the clerks will use a higher pitched voice than your Japanese friends (who you may be with when you're shopping). If you are in the office, you might notice someone picking up the phone raising the pitch of their voice like a whole fifth out of nowhere. I think it's just another layer of showing status.
My wife, who sells makeup, said that to her using a high pitch is to basically brighten things up. Using a low pitched voice would be too dark, and might hurt sales (haha). She also said, which I'm suprised she was aware of, that when talking to customers it is common practice to raise the pitch of the end of your sentence even higher.
I've raid about it in books... but I apologize as I don't quite remember which one I've raid it in.
EDIT: my explination is to explain a high pitched voice in everyday speech. I'm not trying to explain why women on video game shows or anime speak with such a high pitched voice. In the comments of that Famitsu video, the one and only comment basically says "wow what a high voice".
This would be a guess, but I imagine that they would use a high voice on shows like that to "brighten" them up, similar to what my wife was saying.
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This is helpful. Thanks, Steve. IIRC, you live in Japan and have a Japanese wife, right?
And I'm not talking about anime girls, so don't worry about that. Basically, I'm talking about the widespread phenomenon of タレント doing some weird thing with their voices. Maybe "pitch" is not the right word, but there's some pitch/nasal/something change that happens, and a lot more women do it on TV in Japan than in the US.