Anime is one of the most popular genres of Japanese popular culture. It is common that the voice of anime characters is dubbed by professional seiyus (voice actors), with some distinctive phonetic qualities recognised as anime-goe (anime voice) or moe-goe (moe or adorable voice). This voice is linguistically institutionalised or enregistered in contemporary Japanese because of its stereotypical auditory characteristics, which are easily recognisable by anime-otaku (anime fanatics) and the general public.

Our project aims to provide a sociolinguistic account of how the anime voice is socio-culturally institutionalised in Japan, particularly in light of recent trends such as the growing popularity of anime and the acceptance of voice actors as pop culture idols. We will examine how this phenomenon has developed under changing media situations in the early 21st century.

This paper aims to report on some findings of the research, which are obtained from an analysis of female college students' voice performances in a voice actor course, and to examine how they manipulate their voice quality to represent anime characters, such as an adult woman, a kawaii girl, a warrior woman, or a boyish girl. The most notable performance is the production of the voice of a kawaii girl. Acoustic analyses demonstrate that it consists of the following acoustic features: higher frequency and stronger energy in formants, weak breathiness, ringing or resonant quality in the upper frequency region, and a high pitch. Our findings indicate that voice actors skillfully manipulate acoustic features to construct the gender identity of characters, mirroring the way individuals do in everyday interaction. Moreover, we argue that the social meanings of the voice actor's performance must be interpreted in relation to the evolving sociolinguistic landscapes reflected in media culture.