A restudy of postcolonial Palau after two decades

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Tokumasu

2022

This article reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant community in Mexico City – pre-war labour migrants and recent self-movers. We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities. The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of their heritage language in both old and new migrant communities, while highlighting the community-specific effects of both age and languages used in the workplace among the old community and those of contact with relatives and friends in Japan in the case of the newcomer community. We argue that these differences indicate that in the older community, where a strong solidarity network has been developed but where contact with relatives in Japan has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help them maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with their relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of their high language ability. This article concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whereas different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with relatives and friends in the homeland, may aid in its preservation, depending upon the recency of the community’s arrival as well as the strength of community’s network.

The maintenance of Japanese as a heritage language in Mexico: evidence from Japanese pre-war migrants and newcomers

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Tokumasu

2022

Diaspora Japanese: transnational mobility and language contact

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Britain

2022

In introducing this special issue on Japanese outside of Japan, this article sets the scene by providing an overview of the genesis and trajectories of the Japanese diaspora which examines the history of international population movements, demographic transitions, educational orientations and language situations in the resulting communities. It touches upon: (a) the disappearance of the oldest nihon machi (Japan towns) formed by fleeing samurai and traders as refugee and trade diasporas; (b) the emergence of Nikkei (Japanese ancestry) identities in Japanese labour diaspora communities; (c) the obsolescence of varieties of Japanese learnt/acquired during childhood in imperial diaspora contexts, along with the employment and integration of Japanese borrowings in the local languages; (d) the contrast in the social lives and language situations in global Japanese diaspora communities between affluent long-term residents living within Japanese norms, on the one hand, and, on the other, permanent residents seeking personal freedom from these norms; and (e) the contrasting social realities in contemporary Japan of returnee children of Japanese diplomats and expatriate Japanese business executives as a new privileged class, on the one hand, and returnee Nikkei Latin Americans working as foreign labourers in Japan, on the other. Given the wide range of historical and socio-economic contexts in which the Japanese diaspora found itself, we conclude that it continues to provide a rich seam of potential sociolinguistic enquiry, which may provide an illustrative framework serving as a possible model for the historicised analysis of diasporic sociolinguistic complexities in other world contexts.

The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

Britain

2022

Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of linguistic, perceptual, historical and sociodemographic data as well as two decades of sociolinguistic ethnography collected among the postcolonial Japanese speech communities of Palau in the Pacific, this article argues that Palauan Japanese was not simply ‘standard Japanese transported’, but a koineised vernacular variety of Japanese; i.e., a variety resulting from the mixture of different migrant dialects, which was adopted by Palauans through daily interaction with local Japanese settlers during the colonial period. The article concludes by emphasising: (a) the usefulness of teasing apart varieties largely acquired and consolidated through everyday communication with target language speakers from varieties mastered largely through formal schooling; (b) the importance of understanding the social contexts in which ‘new’ colonial varieties are formed as well as the linguistic outcomes of the dialect mixing that occurs when a numerically dominant but dialectally diverse settler population colonises a new territory; and (c) the helpfulness of speech perception and social identification experiments as tools to identify vernacularity.