Keigo in Japanese: a clear guide to honorific language for intermediate learners

You can read keigo. You see お待ちしております at the end of an email, you recognize いらっしゃいませ when you walk into a shop, and you know なさる is the respectful version of する. Then someone asks you to actually write a message to a professor, or you have to answer the phone at a part-time job, and your mind goes blank. The polite Japanese you learned from your textbook, the です・ます you can produce without thinking, suddenly feels like it is not enough.

That gap is where most learners get stuck. Keigo is not a single set of rules you memorize once. It is a system for adjusting how you speak based on who you are talking to and who you are talking about, and the hard part is rarely the vocabulary. It is knowing which form to reach for, and when.

This guide walks through what keigo is, the three forms most learners start with, the official model that goes one level deeper, the social logic (uchi and soto) that decides which form you use, and a practical answer to the question almost nobody addresses: how do you actually learn keigo well enough to use it.

What is keigo?

Keigo (敬語, "respectful language") is the honorific language system in Japanese, a set of grammatical forms and specialized vocabulary used to express respect, humility, or politeness depending on your relationship to the listener and to the people you are talking about. It is woven deep into Japanese culture and Japanese society as a kind of social lubricant: the right keigo signals that you understand your place in a social interaction, and using it well helps establish trust and build relationships.

The Japanese language gives you a sliding scale. Casual speech, the plain dictionary form you use with close friends and family members, sits at one end. The most polite, honorific language sits at the other. Most of daily life happens somewhere in between, and the skill of speaking Japanese well is moving fluidly along that range to convey respect at the right level for each context.

One mechanical point that explains a lot of what follows: casual language uses the plain dictionary form (する, 食べる, 行く), while keigo uses either the polite -masu form or, for many common verbs, an entirely different specialized verb. That single shift, from dictionary form to a more polite form, is the engine of the whole system.

The three types of keigo

The standard classroom model divides keigo into three main types: teineigo, sonkeigo, and kenjougo. Almost every introduction you will read, including this one, starts here because it is the most practical way in.

Teineigo (丁寧語): the polite form

Teineigo is the polite language you already know. It is the です・ます register, the polite speech that uses the -masu suffix on verbs and です on nouns and adjectives. 食べます (tabemasu, "eat"), します (shimasu, "do"), 学生です (gakusei desu, "I am a student"). Even おはようございます (good morning) is teineigo at work, a polite-form greeting you have used since your first week of studying Japanese.