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Paper short abstract

The paper shows that Japanese linguistics, shaped by European paradigms, was rooted in epistemic violence. It argues that these frameworks enabled internal colonization by constructing kokugo as a national norm while marginalizing Ryūkyūan languages as dialects despite their scientific value.

Paper long abstract

The present paper examines how the advent of modern Japanese linguistics, which was shaped by the transfer, adaptation, and reception of European linguistic paradigms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is rooted in epistemic violence. Furthermore, it analyzes how these imported epistemologies became embedded in practices of 'colonization within'. Japan's reception of Western linguistic thought is generally depicted as a narrative of modernization. However, this paper contends that the process concurrently engendered forms of epistemic violence that structured the perception, classification and political treatment of non-standard varieties, notably the Ryūkyūan languages.

Drawing on decolonial theory and metapragmatic approaches to language ideology, the paper analyzes how concepts derived from the Junggrammatiker, comparative philology, and nationalist language movements, originally formulated within a European colonial context, were translated into tools for constructing kokugo as both linguistic norm and moral substance of the Japanese nation-state. This epistemic framework did not seek to describe factual linguistic reality but rather actively produced a hierarchical linguistic order by establishing Tōkyō Japanese as the normative center and constructing all other varieties to the status of 'languages of the periphery' and thus 'dialects'.

Within this newly formed epistemic field, the Ryūkyūan languages occupied a paradoxical position: While they were valuable from a scientific perspective in terms of reconstructing historical stages of the Japanese language, they were concurrently classified as dialects in order to support a homogenizing national project. The tension between scientific recognition and political negation illuminates the workings of epistemic violence: the state determining not only what counted as legitimate knowledge but also what was permitted to exist as a 'language'.

The present paper draws on historical documents, early dialect surveys, and metapragmatic discourse to reveal how linguistics in Japan's nation-building reproduced colonial logics internally. The study utilizes an analytical approach to examine the utilization of linguistic categories in the marginalization of the Ryūkyū Islands. This analysis shall offer a decolonial re-reading of Japanese linguistic modernity, emphasizing the persistent influence of these epistemic formations on contemporary discourses concerning the status, revitalization, and cultural legitimacy of the Ryūkyū languages.