Paper short abstract:

This research explores the monolingual philosophy of spoken Japanese in Japanese society from the perspective of linguistic minorities, including members of the deaf community. We would like to share our results of this research with the audience in a multilingual European society.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores the monolingual philosophy of spoken Japanese in Japanese society from the perspective of linguistic minorities, including members of the deaf community.

In a previous study, we pointed out that Japanese society has a deep-rooted monolingual philosophy of spoken Japanese and that hearing people who use the spoken form of Japanese are unaware that they are more privileged as the linguistic majority of Japanese society than the deaf. In this study, in order to discover the specifics of a monolingual philosophy of spoken Japanese, we analyzed the stories of linguistic minorities of a female Korean immigrant, J, living in Japan, in addition to the stories of SODA (Siblings of Deaf ) and CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) by using a narrative inquiry approach (Bakhuizen, 2013).

The result shows that one of the specifics of monolingual philosophy can be identified in the way that the linguistic majority and minority are evaluated. The linguistic majority conducts an evaluation of the linguistic minority in order to decide whether to accept that minority as a member of society. However, the majority evaluate the minority unconsciously because the majority are privileged compared to the minority.

In the research, linguistic minorities, on the other hand, have expressed their willingness to "evaluate" the linguistic majority and reveal occasions in their stories of have been questioned about privileges and attitudes that do not respect their position.

These evaluations and questions of the oppressed minority to the powerful oppressor majority are necessary viewpoints to reframe Japanese society from the view of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (Freire, 1979). Moreover, they would be the first step in the process of aiming to change the oppressive situation towards a more humane society.

By revealing the power-oriented structure of "evaluation" in Japanese society, it is possible to investigate the language philosophy, such as native speakerism (Holliday, 2005), which underlies Japanese language teaching for linguistic minority students. In this presentation, we would like to share our results of this research and re-examine the perspectives of language minorities living in Japan with the audience in a multilingual European society.