Being a guy, and a foreigner, please correct me as I may very well be wrong. In English, I'm familiar with a feminine "girly" speech style, and a more mature "feminine" speech style, though usually it's more tone than word choice. Arguably, it often impossible to tell from word choice alone with some English speakers if they are male or female. I'm curious how feminine speech patters ("wa," "-kashira," etc.) comes across natively in Japan or to other foreigners, any comments?
I actually did a paper on just that topic in college - about how translation issues can come up because in Japanese there is the gendered word choices but that doesn't exist in English, so a lot of nuances can end up getting changed.
it was a lot of fun to write ^.^ it was for a Japanese Pop Culture class, we had to write a paper on a manga, so I chose Ranma 1/2 and the translating issues therein
This should include the fact it is female speech, DoBJG has this entry as:
"A sentence final particle used in weak assertive or volitional sentences by a female speaker. " also it repeats it under Notes: "The sentence particle わ is used only in female speech and expresses the speaker's weak assertion or volition"
This is *definitely* not true. I cannot speak for the Tokyo dialect, but I've heard male speakers using it (I was in Miyagi at the time). I think it is primarily used by females, but not exclusively. So, I'd prefer to not add/change anything until I can get some more definitive info on it.
It is true that in dialect わ has other usages, for instances quoting a search result online as an example (which agree with other results): The kansai 「わ」 is used by both male and female, and has no feminine effect even when used by female. The feminine 「わ」 does have an feminine effect, and is sometimes used to signal that the character in a book is a female etc. The two わ are also pronounced differently.
Interestingly, 「わよ」 is exclusively feminine 「わ」. Male usage of 「わよ」 is associated with transgender and homo-sexuality (talents like 美輪明宏 use it, presumably to emphasize their femininity?). Usage of わよ seems to be rare among Japanese female (at least in younger generations).
But if you go the way of including dialect in the grammar dictionary, then I bet the majority of particles would need a bunch of extra definition, which I don't think would be helpful (at this stage) I think a good compromise would be to phrase it as "mostly used by female"
