I met a very polite chauffeur in Tokyo one time. She drove あたくし
Something I like: on Wiktionary pages for Japanese first-person pronouns, you’ll always find a table of late-2000s survey results, showing the top three first-person pronouns in five different situations, as used by elementary school boys, elementary school girls, young men in university, and young women in university. So in that way you can get sort of an overall picture of how pronoun usage varies by gender, age and context.
Interesting. I always thought watashi was feminine and boku was masculine. I never knew what jibun meant.
Some female rock stars in Japan (LiSA, for instance) use boku. I assumed it meant she was a tomboy (which the video implies as well).
I use boku but I didn’t think there was a choice. I’d heard of ore but never knew what it was.
There’s some social norms and expectations that direct the choice, but it is one. People will change their personal pronoun choice dependant on the social context, too.
My partner got into BTS, and at some point I decided to try listening to some of their releases in Japanese. The different members personal pronoun use gave me a lot of information despite the fact that my Japanese is super elementary and rusty (better than my near non-existent knowledge of Korean). In some of their earlier, more rap focused songs there’s lots of 自分s and their later, more pop focused songs tend to have more 僕s and 俺 s.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
