A journey through Japan’s linguistic peripheries

Japan is often erroneously perceived as a monolingual country. This is not true and Japan is a multilingual and multicultural country where varied languages and traditions coexist.

This post explores Japan’s linguistic ecology by exploring the relationship between center and periphery. On our journey, we will see how linguistic resources change value, function and ownership as they move through an ideologically stratified system where the norms and criteria of appropriateness that emanate from the center influence those of peripheral and liminal territories.

Center

Our journey starts from the capital Tōkyō, the city that hosts the majority of the financial and political institutions of the country. Given its importance, it is not surprising that the city has had a central role in issues related to language as well.

Tōkyō has had a decisive impact on the ‘movement for the unification of the written and spoken language’ 言文一致運動 genbun itchi undō. Its goal was to replace older forms of the Japanese language with the vernacular variety of the time to facilitate literacy.

To achieve that, the Tōkyō variety (or “Edo”, as Tōkyō was called until the late 19^th century) was chosen as the base to envision a ‘national language’ 国語 kokugo.

150 years on and the political efforts that have been made to establish a common language can be considered largely successful. Communications in Japan have indeed been standardized, and Japan’s literacy rate is as high as 99%, one of the highest in the world.

Periphery

Standardization implies deviation. Therefore, all the other ways of speaking throughout the Japanese archipelago were categorized as dialects. Other varieties saw their usage severely curtailed, starting in schools which tried to stamp out anything other than Tōkyō Japanese.

Discouraged in official communication, dialects have become an expression of locality, part of the cultural identity associated with a specific place. This role has been embraced by prefectures and individuals alike. Institutional bodies such as museums and tourism boards use dialects as a means to promote local culture.

Sometimes grammar rules and words are turned into anthropomorphic characters and appear on souvenirs and merchandise like the notebook I have received at the University of Kōchi during my time there as an exchange student. The linguistic and cultural distance between center and periphery has been turned into a marketable commodity. Dialects are also used to portray characters in media for their ability to convey the stereotypes associated to them.

In real life, too, dialects enable people who do not wish to fit within mainstream language practices to inhabit a different ‘voice’, performing what has been called ‘dialect cosplay’ as an act of linguistic transgression.

Dialects may seem to assume playful roles in many occasions. However, it is not all fun and games as the necessity to confront the demands of standard language remains, and most young Japanese students know this well. The dreaded ‘exam hell’, a series of standardized examinations that Japanese students must take during their entire school lives, require mastery of the standard language as well as being able to produce it as part of an appropriate repertoire. The stakes are high and students, already under immense pressure, can afford little to no space for linguistic deviations.

Liminality

The more we head towards the borders of the country, the greater diversity we find, including a number of endangered languages. The languages of the Ainu people from the northernmost island of Hokkaidō, for instance, are on the verge of extinction. The same is true of languages spoken on the islands that dot Okinawa prefecture to the South and those of the Izu islands, an archipelago that stretches far into the Pacific Ocean east of Tōkyō.

In these areas, the demographic crisis is taking a heavy toll on the number of speakers, as young people leave rural areas in search of opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.

The center cannot hold

Meanwhile, Tōkyō has become super-diverse linguistically. It is no longer only the center of Japan but also a global city. Japanese is today used alongside English and a host of migrant languages. Against these, struggling peripheries are trying to find new ways to express their local identities through “authentic” language. They follow the center’s norms but occasionally playfully transcend and violate those norms.

Overall, Japan’s linguistic ecology is deeply rooted in the center-periphery dichotomy but the center and the peripheries are themselves changing.

Reference

Heinrich, Patrick. (2018). Dialect cosplay: Language use by the young generation. In Patrick Heinrich & Christian Galan (Eds.), Being Young in Super-Aging Japan: Formative Events and Cultural Reactions (pp. 166-182). London: Routledge.