Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates Japanese heritage language speaking children’s interaction and argues for the need to recognize the dialogic aspect of their speech as a component of “child agency”. The focus is on in-group communication within families and on languages as sets of communicative resources.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates Japanese heritage language (JHL) speaking children’s interaction and argues for the need to recognize the dialogic aspect of their speech as a component of “child agency” (Smith-Christmas 2020). The focus is on in-group communication within families, where languages are seen as sets of resources in the JHL speakers’ repertoires. How dialogic elements of the common repertoires are employed concretely as communicative resources in everyday JHL interaction is a topic in need of further analysis.

Social actors are typically understood to be determined socio-culturally, but also linguistically by the grammatical structures of the languages they master (Al Zidjaly 2009). Rather than discussing “agency” in relation to the structural dimension of social reality, this paper zooms on the latter, more specifically on the dialogic aspects of speech as representations of co-constructed, in-situ forms of (discoursive) agency. Our pilot analysis of discourse data shows evidence of JHL children’s agency in discourse through “parallelism”. Children, much like their parents, engage in the process of creating “family language ecology” through linguistic practices. The data come from case studies of Japanese and Finnish-Japanese families residing in Finland.

The theoretical framework of Dialogic Syntax (DS) (Du Bois 2014) is adopted to analyze the linguistic and interactional processes involved in JHL communicative dynamics. In this orientation, the structural organization of language is considered not only to communicate or reason, but also to engage. The dynamic emergence of “structural resonance” in interaction can be analyzed in functional terms as serving communicative and collaborative goals of JHL speakers. Based on the principle of DS, all participants in conversation construct discourse together by creating structural resonance. Among such communicative collaborative moves, the most effective one is “parallelism”, linguistic paring of patterns in discourse. As our analysis demonstrates, it is not only a form of repetition, but also a powerful strategy that serves the communicative and cognitive goals of its users.

Paper short abstract:

For deaf children, attending deaf school which uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is crucial for their social and cognitive development. This paper reports a legal case that is still ongoing in which a Deaf student sued the government and the reactions from the Deaf community in Japan about the case.

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to popular views, Japan is not a monolingual country and in fact, UNESCO lists eight indigenous languages within the boundary of Japan, including the Ainu and the languages of the Ryukyu Islands. Another linguistic minority in Japan is the Deaf community, the users of Japanese Sign Language (henceforth JSL), which is linguistically a distinct language from Japanese. It is not widely known that JSL is different from Signed Japanese, but the latter is a manual (and often insufficient) representation of the Japanese and does not possess the linguistic features of JSL, such as classifiers and referential shifts.

For deaf and hard-of-hearing (henceforth DHH) children, having access to JSL from birth is vital for their language acquisition, but unfortunately it is not the case for many of them, the results of which can lead to a phenomenon known as Language Deprivation. Many DHH children face the risk of language deprivation because their first language is different from that of their parents, which is a challenge rarely found in bilingual children in two spoken languages.

Furthermore, for a child to develop both socially and academically, school plays an important role and that also applies to DHH children, and thus one could claim that Deaf schools provide “linguistic home” environments for Deaf children. Unfortunately, however, only two deaf schools in Japan offer instruction through JSL as of March 2022. At one such school, Sapporo Schools for Deaf, one Deaf student sued the government and the board of education for not replacing the retiring teachers with high commands of JSL, which resulted in assigning non-signing teachers for his class, and therefore deprived of his rights to education. The deaf community in Japan reacted to this movement in various ways: there is an enthusiastic supports from signing Deaf people, while the Japanese Federation of the Deaf reacting in favour of the government. This paper analyses this seemingly ambiguous reactions of the Deaf community on this problem and how the policy makers and the government take advantages of such disagreements in silencing the minority voices altogether.

Paper short abstract:

The topic of my talk is the relationship between language and well-being, and I present and compare quantitative data from two case studies (Yomitan Village in Okinawa and Setouchi Town in Amami). The degree of Ryukyuan language knowledge is related to concepts of well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Japan is a country of comparatively low linguistic diversity, and this has in the past resulted in the imagination of Japan as a monolingual nation. The sociolinguistic situation is different from such imaginations, though. Several autochthon languages and allochthonous languages are spoken in Japan. Multilingualism has always existed in Japan, and it is expanding. The languages are mostly spoken in private domains but do occasionally appear in unexpected places. It has often been noted that multilingualism in Japan is poorly understood by policymakers, and official language policies do not reflect the multilingual makeup and repertoires we find in Japan. As a result, also the school curriculum or the official linguistic landscape does not reflect the linguistic composition of Japanese society. There are many diverse grassroots efforts to maintain and cultivate linguistic diversity, though. While the utility of languages other than Japanese and English in Japan is low, there are a great number of covert benefits of using other languages in daily life. This chapter zooms in on one such benefit, well-being. My paper presents and compares quantitative data from two case studies (Yomitan Village in Okinawa and Setouchi Town in Amami) where the degree of Ryukyuan language knowledge is related to different conceptualizations of well-being (Subjective Happiness Scale, Cantril’s Ladder, Satisfaction with Life Scale) while taking into account identity, social capital and the decolonization of the mind as moderator variables. The results allow for a discussion to which extent the maintenance of an endangered language provides comfort to speakers and relates to their well-being. The presentation seeks to answer the question of to what extent are those who maintain their endangered language able to resist the sociocultural displacement that accompanies language shift and loss.

Paper short abstract:

In this talk I examine the purpose and pedagogical practices of, as well as language ideologies behind Japanese heritage educational organisations (HEO) and what this means for migrant children of Japanese heritage growing up in Germany.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese communities have a long history and vibrant presence in Europe. Concomitant with this settlement was the establishment of educational infrastructures – Japanese supplementary schools – to cater to children’s language learning needs. Using Germany as an example, where these institutions emerged early on, I examine their language ideology and teaching practices. Based on interviews with teachers and former students, as well as analysis of the schools’ documents, it transpires that such an ideology is built on the belief that these schools teach Japanese as a national language (kokugo), rather than a heritage language, to children of Japanese parentage. In addition, teachers and educators in these weekend supplementary schools go so far as to urge parents to create an all-Japanese environment in their children’s daily lives. I argue that such a teaching philosophy, which is out of touch with the reality of Japanese communities today, enacts both bridges and barriers. While heritage language hence acquired by students enables an emotional and communicative bridge linking Japanese offspring in Germany to their family members in Japan, these schools also create new borders within the Japanese migrant communities by side-lining mixed families with less resources for language maintenance. I conclude by discussing the broader implications of such pedagogical practices in Japanese supplementary schools. Notably, they have a delocalising effect by creating doubts of what constitutes one’s country, national language/identity (a form of psychological barrier), and ultimately “home” in the minds of Japanese offspring who are born in and identify with Europe.