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.