私, not 私は僕: the pronoun that never grows a callus
Every major Naruto character's first-person pronoun tracks their arc — Naruto stays オレ, Sasuke hardens into 俺, Lee never leaves ボク. Hinata is the one major character who starts on 私 (watashi, the formal "I" more associated with adult women and business Japanese than with twelve-year-old genin) and simply never moves off it. 「逃げたくない！」 ("...I DON'T WANT TO RUN ANYMORE!") and 「勝負です」 ("...LET'S FIGHT.") — her challenge to Neji at the Chūnin exam prelims — read almost prim in Japanese: 勝負です ends in the copula です, the same polite register she'd use ordering tea. VIZ's flat "Let's fight" can't preserve that: in English a challenge is just a challenge, but in Japanese this is a challenge delivered with the grammar of a girl who has never once in her life been rude to anyone, aimed at herself as much as at Neji.
Punctuation as performance: the ellipsis that stands in for a stutter
Hinata's most reliable fingerprint isn't a word at all — it's the 「．．．」 that precedes almost everything she says, a typographic stutter that VIZ's letterers reproduce faithfully as English ellipses. It's there in 「これは．．私の独りよがり．．．」 ("I'M... JUST BEING SELFISH...") and in the fragmented delivery of her Pain-arc monologue, where a single thought — "I am here because I want to be" — gets sliced across two panels: 「ここに立ってるのは」 held back a full beat before 「私の意志」 lands. The effect in the original is a girl visibly working up the nerve to keep talking; English ellipses convey hesitation but flatten the specific rhythm of where the Japanese breaks the sentence, always right before the word that costs her something to say.
The bell-test structure of a five-panel confession
Her single most-quoted scene — jumping between Naruto and Pain to declare 「私はナルト君が大好きだから．．．」 ("...I LOVE YOU...") — is preceded by a monologue built entirely on parallel structure: 「いつもナルト君を追いかけて．．．」／「いつだってナルト君と一緒に歩きたくて．．．」／「いつもナルト君のところへ．．．」 ("I always chased after you..." / "wanting to walk together with you forever" / "always toward you..."), three clauses that all open on いつも／いつだって ("always") before the sentence finally resolves on 「ナルト君が私を変えてくれた！」 ("YOU CHANGED ME, NARUTO!"). It's the same rhetorical trick VIZ's lettering can't fully carry — the anaphora of いつも stacking three times before the payoff — that makes the scene read as a girl who has rehearsed this speech for years finally getting through it. The line every fan actually screenshots, though, isn't the confession itself but what precedes it: 「だからナルト君を守るためなら死ぬ事なんて怖くない！！」 ("AND THAT'S WHY I'M NOT AFRAID TO DIE, DEFENDING YOU!!") — the one sentence on this page with no ellipsis in it at all, all the hesitation finally burned off.
For the two people this speech and the earlier bell-test lecture were each aimed at, see the companion pages: Kakashi Hatake's quotes and Naruto Uzumaki's quotes. Her clan's signature dōjutsu is covered in full in the Byakugan jutsu entry — the same white, pupil-less eyes that flare on in the very panel where she tells Neji she won't run.