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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines stylistic variation in the speeches by a mayor of Nagoya, Mr. Takashi Kawamura and discusses how he constructs his identity through the use of one phonological feature (monophthongnization of /ai/ and /ae/ into /æ/) in Nagoya dialect.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines stylistic variation in the speeches by a mayor of Nagoya, Japan, Mr. Takashi Kawamura and discusses how he constructs his identity through the use of one phonological feature in Nagoya dialect. Mr. Kawamura was first elected to be a member of the Japanese Diet from 1992 when he appeared in a public domain. Although at the beginning of his career, he did not use his home dialect features, he gradually employed his Nagoya dialect features in his speeches and discussion at the committee meetings. By the time he became a mayor of Nagoya in 2009, he was a well-known figure who command a large degree of his Nagoya dialect features at national level.
This paper pays a close attention to one variable, monophthongnization of /ai/ and /ae/ into /æ/. This is one of the most distinctive features in Nagoya dialect. I have collected Mr. Kawamura’s speech in a number of occasions such as his speech at the general meetings of the Nagoya local Assembly as well as other occasions such as his speech at National Diet when he was one of the members in 1990s, Also, he has shown at TV shows and his speech in various part of Nagoya city as well. The total amount of data sums up to 5.5 hours. I conducted transcriptions, and made quantitative analyses.
The result clearly supports my assumption. He came to use /æ/ in his discourse in accordance with his career. This trend is emphasized when he became a mayor of Nagoya in 2009 although other members of Nagoya city council rarely use this phonological feature. This paper will point out on the basis of the result, that he uses his strategy to perform his character as a major, and he intentionally increase his use of /æ/ in his discourse. At the same time, this is one of the cases of ‘performance register’ (Schilling-Estes 1998).
Reference:
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating ‘self-conscious’ speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27.1: 53-83.
Linguistic diversity in contemporary Japan
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -