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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines multilingualism in Japan, using Tokyo’s Ameyoko as a case study. Approaches to identifying, counting, and mapping languages give way to studying how linguistic interactions and social spaces influence each other.

Paper long abstract

Multilingualism can be examined historically by tracing how languages arrive, spread, retreat, or change over time. It can also be approached by studying the classical sociolinguistic question of who speaks what to whom. However, geographic approaches are increasingly difficult to apply because speakers and languages are mobile, and minorities and immigrants have become superdiverse. Consequently, the study of language distribution across (immutable) space is giving way to the study of language use in social space.

Research in urban centers now routinely focuses on the use of language across language boundaries (translanguaging), and linguistic diversity is thereby not explained solely by attending to the speaker. Social space receives more attention because speakers move through spaces filled with expectations and norms about language use. When space is seen as socially constructed, we must ask: how do linguistic interactions shape social spaces, and how do social spaces influence linguistic interactions? This implies that language is not simply regarded as a tool that conveys propositional content or gives its speaker away through variation (dialect, sociolect, genderlect, etc.). Language and space are emergent and dialectically related.

My presentation exemplifies this view by focusing on interactions in Ameyoko in Tokyo’s Taito Ward. The physical layout of this space defines the spaces that emerge through linguistic interaction, as do different kinds of knowledge, experiences, and perceptions. Drawing on data from Ameyoko’s linguistic soundscape, I zoom in on synchronized moments of understanding across language boundaries, the use of a lingua franca, the use of incompletely acquired language, or the use of set linguistic tokens in specific spaces. The interactions observed are emergent and hard to predict. Yet they are not ad hoc or random, because all linguistic interactions reflect attitudes and experiences shaped by relations of power. I argue that understanding these complexities is key to understanding contemporary language use, the social spaces it creates, and, ultimately, present-day society.