Is である a polite form of the copula?

Today, I saw an interesting post on Japanese Stackexchange. The user had been having trouble with understanding Japanese polite speech (敬語) and had tried to rely on Reddit to get a better understanding of it. The Reddit post the user linked in the JSE post was not super clear and it characterized “formal” as a “polite” speech register.

Now usually, I don’t really answer on JSE. A lot of people know Japanese (grammar) better than me, but I remembered a cool analogy I saw on Discord and decided to make a comment with it. The thing is, that comment didn’t actually help them answer their own question, so I felt bad and decided to post a full answer.

Since this is a pretty common question (and something I discuss somewhat extensively in my book), I feel like I should discuss this on this blog. It’s not always easy to understand the difference between politeness and formality. To guide us, I would like to start with the analogy I mentioned above. Well actually, it’s more of an illustration than a proper analogy, but whatever.

The reason why formality and politeness are independent is because you can have speech patterns that reflect all four logical possibilities.

1. Not formal, not polite speech: Talking with your best friend.
2. Not formal, polite speech: Meeting a friend of a friend.
3. Formal, not polite speech: Wikipedia’s writing style.
4. Formal, polite speech: Sending an e-mail to HR.

In other words, you can have any combination of formality and politeness. This means that you cannot say that one is directly responsible for the other. Formal speech is not a part of polite speech. They are independent.

To be more precise, these are the definitions we should keep in mind. Polite speech refers to speech that is used to show care towards the person you’re speaking to (the interlocutor in grammatical terms). Formal speech refers to speech that follows a set of predetermined rules for specific contexts, such as sending an e-mail to a supervisor or writing an encyclopedia.

So how does polite speech work in Japanese, exactly?

I like the description in this great book by 松岡弘. The author describes four categories in polite speech. All English translations are my own:

1. Courteous language (丁寧語)
2. Refined language (美化語)
3. Humble language (謙譲語)
4. Respectful language (尊敬語)

The first two are what is usually called “polite speech” in English when referring to Japanese grammar.

Courteous language is mostly your usual です・ます forms. Refined language is a pretty cool aspect of Japanese in my opinion. 美化 means ‘beautification’, and it is used to make your speech more refined (hence my translation). One way in which this is done is the through the prefix 御- which is read お・ご・み depending on the situation. For instance, 御家族 (ごかぞく), 御子 (みこ) and 御食事 (おしょくじ). For this reason, the prefix is usually written in kana (especially in the お・ご readings).

Then, there’s honorific language. These are used to show respect to the person we are speaking to. There are two ways to do this. You can either lower yourself relative to them, or you can elevate them relative to you. Either way, you’re on the lower end of the relationship. This is the basic rule you have to follow if you want to use honorific speech.

Lowering yourself calls for humble language (謙譲語), and elevating your interlocutor calls for respectful language (尊敬語). As such, they are used together. These are the two broad categories of 敬語: (generally) polite speech (丁寧語 and 美化語) and honorific speech (謙譲語 and 尊敬語).

Formality on the other end calls for the use of the formal (sometimes called literary) copula: である. This is the form of the copula descending directly from にてあり (the old copula), and it is used for formal purposes. Do notice it does have a polite form as well (であります), but we usually don’t see it as often.

For more on this, see the book I mentioned above which goes more deeply into the use of だ・である for formal speech.