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Language and social justice

Can speaking dialect make you ugly?

By October 16, 2019December 3rd, 20205 Comments5 min read4,676 views

The link between language and identity is a subject written about most profusely by linguists, and it never seems to fall into obsolescence. Yet, novelists manipulate the association between language and identity most expertly.

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

Gegentuul Baioud

Author Gegentuul Baioud

Gegentuul Baioud completed her PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral research focused on the linguistic and cultural performance of authenticity in wedding ceremonies in Inner Mongolia. Her research interests include the intersection of language shift, cultural performance and language commodification in the context of Chinese nation building. She also has a Masters in Applied Linguistics from East China Normal University.

More posts by Gegentuul Baioud

Join the discussion 5 Comments

  • Hana says:

    After reading this article, I looked for an interesting story that changed the ugly image of dialect. In Korea, dialects are also attractively treated in the media, while some people regard them as a mockery by region. In particular, it had a strong image as an area where people in Jeolla-do (the name of Southern part) are ignorant and use strong language, perhaps because of TV or movies. To this end, a stationery brand called “Yeok-Sa-Seo-So (meaning: Let’s buy it here!)” was created to show that there are many soft and interesting words. This brand is a stationery brand developed using interesting dialects across the country. There are many products that can represent the region, but we started it because we wanted to create a brand with the Korean language that is only used in Jeolla-do, the CEO said. It turned the ugly image of the dialect into chic and trendy, so I enjoyed reading it in connection with this article.

  • Shiyi.ke says:

    I read this mentioned short novel“yesterday” after reading this article, even though the dialects are not the mainstream in the novel, however it mentions the role of dialect in self- identification. The male protagonist is a native of Tokyo but speaks guanxi dialect all the time, the fundamental reason is that he is deeply immersed in self-identification doubts.The depression of failing the college entrance examination for three consecutive years made him gradually accustomed to escaping reality. And changing the accent is a way of escape for him to change his origin.

    For me, I am from Grangxi province which is famous for strong funny accent. I found that my fellow would not dare to speak that way and change their accents pretentiouly ,cuz they are afraid of others making fun of them.

  • Laura S-K says:

    Thanks so much for this fascinating discussion about and peek into Murakami’s story. It really seems that one reason for his language practice seeming ugly is because of its subversiveness or deviance from social expectations.

    I am also reminded about Ingrid’s work about hearing faces and seeing accents (was that it?) and how while on the one hand someone from a regional area would be expected to work towards using the standard dialect, Kitaru simply doesn’t have the right look to use a less-valued dialect.

    While reading this, I also wondered about the translation work for this story, and how the original portrayed dialect use (and how this was transferred into the English translation).

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