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Paper short abstract

The aim of this presentation is to dispel the myth that young people in Japan are experiencing increasing difficulty in using polite language. To do this, I present data from seven months of fieldwork. I also highlight the importance of club activities as a research setting for sociolinguistics.

Paper long abstract

Since the 1990s, it has commonly been acknowledged that young people in Japan are becoming less capable of using polite language. This view is widely shared by scholars as well as the public. For instance, Inoue (1998) noticed that students used fewer honorifics; and opinion polls on the national language conducted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (2015) revealed that more than 70 percent of the respondents felt that young people’s way of speaking was improper. In this presentation, I challenge the conventional wisdom by presenting data from an extended period of fieldwork in three youth groups in Tokyo. I show that not only do young people possess a wide repertoire of referent and addressee honorific terms as well as knowledge of humble forms, but they could also code-switch between plain and various levels of polite forms of talk with relative ease according to changing identities.

My findings are contrary to what most people attested because of the in-depth and prolonged observation and data collection in extra-curricular clubs, a hitherto overlooked environment for detailed analyses of youth language. In these common settings across Japan, new members are socialised in and through language at the beginning of every academic year. This includes the teaching of a discourse to be used in interactions with senior members. Repetitions, corrections, and at times sanctions carried out by seniors render junior members competent in linguistic behaviour. That there exists a common belief that young people do not master polite language could be facilitated by patterns of student behaviour in Japan: a propensity to stick to people of the same age group for their leisure time out of school. My study proposes that analyses of youth language emphasise more on secondary school extra-curricular club settings, and the need to critically examine socialisation processes and effects, for they represent the first instance of socially meaningful contact with honorifics and social indexical orders that students experience during their most formative years. This would enable sociolinguistic research to make even more meaningful contributions to studies on youth language use, social behaviour and change.

Agency for Cultural Affairs. 2015. “Heisei 26 nendo kokugo ni kansuru yoron chousa no kekka ni tsuite: Results of the opinion poll on the national language in the year Heisei 26.” Last modified October 31, 2016.

Inoue, Fumio. 1998. Nihongo Uotchingu: Watching Japanese. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

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Paper short abstract

The paper discusses findings from the analysis of conversational humour used by two young male friends. It shows that they have developed a specific humour style and focuses on two types of highly ritualized conversational activities that emerged from the analysis as particularly salient.

Paper long abstract

Conversational humour is a prime example of an interactional achievement. It is essentially based on the co-participants' group-specific knowledge and crucially depends on their joint efforts and collaboration. As such, it may not only add enjoyment and pleasure to the ongoing conversation, but also promote solidarity, enhance rapport, and reinforce the sense of affiliation and cohesiveness among the group members. Individual groups develop their own ways of and rules for achieving humour together, which, among other things, reflect the group members' social relations, positioning vis-à-vis one another, common values, and interactional history. Exploring the ways that humour is achieved and used by particular groups can thus yield invaluable insights into their worlds.

The present paper presents and discusses findings from a close analysis of the instances of conversational humour found in three audio-recorded spontaneous conversational interactions of two Japanese young men who identify as close friends. It demonstrates that the two friends have developed a specific humour style which manifests itself through distinguishable types of conversational activities that they routinely engage in so as to achieve humour together. The paper focuses on two types of highly ritualized conversational activities that emerged from the analysis as particularly salient and constitutive of the conversational interactions of the two friends. It is shown that in their structure they strongly resemble the humorous exchanges characteristic of Japanese duo stand-up comedy manzai and that they make the two friends fundamentally interdependent and inseparable, as one of them consistently assumes and is positioned as having the role of a 'fool', whereas the other consistently assumes and is positioned as having the role of a 'straight man'.

The study is theoretically and methodologically informed primarily by interactional linguistics and interactional sociolinguistics. The subject matter it considers forms a part of the author's larger scale research on the ways that Japanese young people 'do friendship' in and through conversational interaction. Even though scholarly interest in conversational humour has burgeoned over the past two decades or so, Japanese conversational humour remains seriously underexplored.