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- Convenor:
-
Ayumi Miyazaki
(International Christian University)
- Location:
- 201 A
- Start time:
- 17 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
We analyze dynamic linguistic power negotiations in increasingly diverse Japanese contexts, such as the media, schools, courtrooms, and language activism, and in doing so, we seek to provide theoretical refinement and ethnographic clarification of the working of language and power.
Long Abstract:
We analyze how power relationships are negotiated and shifted through language in increasingly diverse Japanese contexts where people in class, ethnic, gendered, and regional peripheries challenge the still powerful monolingual ideologies of Standard Japanese. To demystify the powerful modernist language ideology, it is not enough, as Inoue (2006), our panel discussant, observes, simply to describe the diversity of linguistic practices; rather, one must examine the dynamic linguistic and social negotiations among the dominant and subordinate groups in diverse "sites (Silverstein 1998)" for ideological struggles. This is what we will undertake, based on extensive ethnographies, interviews and document analysis.
The first session seeks to develop theories of language and power by elucidating power struggles over dialects and honorifics: how different beliefs about language collide (Kroskrity 2009) among language revitalization movements in the Ryukyus and among the media and other agents developing policies to simplify honorific language used for the imperial family, and how unequal power relationships play out over the use of dialects in regional courtrooms among judges, lawyers, and defendants.
The second session explores the intricacies of gendered and ethnic power constructions at school through longitudinal ethnographies and in-depth conversational analysis: how girls and boys negotiate their language ideologies through their creative, gender-crossing pronouns; how teachers and students negotiate their linguistic power relationships at a Muslim school; and how teachers exercise covert power over ethnic minority in a JSL classroom. These presentations combine to deliver both theoretical refinement and ethnographic clarification of the working of language and power.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper examines language ideology of Ryukyuan language revitalization efforts. This ideology is a reaction to ideology oppressive to linguistic diversity. More concretely, it studies efforts of popular alignment to the empowering ideology by applying frame analysis on interviews and attitude surveys.
Paper long abstract:
Language choices are value choices, and the value also derives from ideology. Language revitalization efforts must therefore entail what can be termed "language ideological clarification". Yet, the study of language revitalization treats issues of language ideological clarification rather lightly. Without challenging dominant ideologies towards languages facing extinction, these languages cannot be maintained. The case studied here is that of the Ryukyuan languages, six endangered languages spoken in the southwest of the Japanese Archipelago.
Every ideology has two aspects. The first is empowering. However, empowerment through ideology can only be comprehensively understood when taking the oppressive ideology into account which makes empowerment necessary or desirable. This is the second aspect. This paper studies language ideology which has been oppressive of Ryukyuan language vitality and maintenance and the emancipative or empowering ideology put forth as a reaction in the past two decades.
Language ideology oppressing language diversity in Japan has been broadly studied in the past years and this paper will simply summarize these results as they relate to empowering ideology. In studying empowering language ideology in favor of Ryukyuan language maintenance and revitalization, results of questionnaire surveys,
Participant observation and interviews will be discussed. These will be analyzed by using concepts of frame analysis, and here in particular frame alignment. This includes, in more concrete terms, processes of "what kinds of problems are identified", the "suggested solutions to these problems" and "how others are sought to be mobilized" in taking similar views and interests towards these problems and their proposed solution.
Paper short abstract:
By analyzing Japanese newspapers’ honorific simplification policy in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper aims to fortify a notion of “ideological clarification” (Kroskrity 2009). Interviews of individuals involved, newspapers’ in-house editorial policies, and newspaper unions’ materials are examined.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines Japanese newspapers' honorific simplification policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Using Kroskrity's "ideological clarification" (2009), it examines how awareness, positionality, and multiplicity of language ideologies revealed and produced shifts in ideologies and language use.
Since the late 19th century, Japanese daily newspapers have referred to the Japanese imperial family members with honorifics with the highest deference. Failing to do so often invited violent opposition from the right wing. Although the use of imperial honorifics was simplified in the postwar period, most newspapers have continued to use some honorifics. At present, many consider newspapers' use of imperial honorifics as a "prescriptive" norm. Even so, some newspapers, such as The Asahi, tried to establish an honorific simplification policy in the 1980s and 1990s. This honorific simplification policy-making has been undergoing ideological struggles, on which differences in language ideologies — the situated, partial, and interested character of conceptions and uses of language (Errington 2001) — are displayed dramatically.
Newspapers' honorific simplification policy-making is a complex process because the policy-making has revealed and produced ideologies by various parties, including newspaper editors, the Imperial Household Agency, the national policy makers on orthography and honorifics, newspaper readers, the Japan Federation of Newspaper Workers' Unions [Shimbun Roren], and the international press.
This paper aims for the "ideological clarification" of newspapers' use of imperial honorifics. To this end, this paper examines interviews of individuals who were involved in the policy, The Asahi's in-house editorial policies, and Shimbun Roren materials.
Paper short abstract:
I seek to develop theories of language and power by elucidating power struggles over dialects: how unequal power relationships play out over the use of dialects in Kansai courtrooms among judges, lawyers, and defendants.
Paper long abstract:
Based on extensive ethnographic research in civil and criminal courts in the Kansai area, this paper analyzes how judges and lawyers use dialects for various functions, even though courts are considered to be a public place where Standard Japanese is expected to be used. Extensive analysis revealed that lawyers and judges used dialects strategically 1) to manipulate counterparties by creating a relaxed space and banal atmosphere to get them off guard and then by attacking and pinning them down, 2) to shift from monotonous Standard Japanese to rhythmical dialects to call attention to their arguments, 3) to conceal unfavorable evidence, and 4) to report others' accounts spoken in a dialect.
Lawyers and judges used those functions of dialects to gain power over defendants and witnesses and they constructed language ideologies about their dialect use as strategic and maneuverable tools. Laypersons in court, however, used Standard Japanese, their formal language, except for in their reported speech. In some politically laden trials where defendants consciously performed their dialects to assert their identities, their dialects were discouraged, ignored, and replaced with Standard Japanese in the court record (the processes of "erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000)").
This asymmetry of power in court restricts participants' rights to use their own language - the language that embodies their identity and way of life. This restriction not only compromises participants' ability to present evidence effectively, but also denies them the opportunity to resist the naturalized ideology that Standard Japanese is the language that everyone should understand.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how a boy who employs feminine linguistic practices persistently negotiates other students’ metapragmatic commentaries (Silverstein 1976) about his “okama-fag” speech, and how the boy, in doing so, shifts the configuration of Japanese gendered language ideologies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes how a boy who employs feminine linguistic practices, including feminine first-person pronouns, persistently negotiates and resists other students' metapragmatic commentaries (Silverstein 1976) about his "okama-fag" speech, and how the boy, in doing so, shifts the configuration of Japanese gendered language ideologies.
Language ideologies, Inoue (2006) explains, are an assemblage of "metapragmatic" statements, which cover various forms of people's "reflective social practices of language use," including "everyday commentaries about how people speak." My longitudinal ethnography reveals that girls and boys craft varieties of non-traditional, gender-crossing first-person pronouns and constantly mark, comment on, and evaluate one another's pronoun use. Through these metapragmatic activities, these students create new sets of indexical meanings of Japanese gendered language. For instance, girls' use of the plain masculine "boku" in informal context goes unmarked, and girls' use of the most masculine pronoun, "ore" is often validated as cool.
Traditional language ideology is most firm, however, with respect to boys' feminine speech, which is constantly marked, made fun of, and discouraged as "kimoi-disgusting." This paper analyzes ethnographic and interview accounts of how a feminine boy copes with those frequent accusations by using various strategies, such as evading the topic, marking back, and shifting his feminine speech and tone to masculine ones, and how in doing so he gradually questions and resignifies (Butler 1997) the boundary of the feminine/masculine and the meaning of the desirable masculinity. Metapragmatic activities thus provide a crucial window to elucidate how language ideologies are constructed, negotiated and shifted.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the language use and language attitude of South Asians in a Muslim community in Japan, challenging the current monolingual view on one-to-one mapping of language and ethnicity.
Paper long abstract:
Standard Japanese is often considered an important symbol of Japanese national/ethnic/cultural identity. This monolingual ideology leads people to think that foreign residents in Japan regard their ethnic language as a symbol of their distinct identity, and a counter-identity towards the idea of 'monolingual and monoethnic Japan'. According to this view, codeswitching among standard Japanese, second language varieties of Japanese ('foreigner's Japanese'), and non-Japanese languages is regarded as a site of power struggles, conflicts, and contestations of ethnicities and cultural values. Based on ethnography and micro-level analysis of community interaction, this paper challenges such 'mirrored view' of other ethnic groups.
In this paper, I will first give an overview the language choice and language attitudes of the South Asian Muslims in Japan vis-à-vis current global and local issues that they face, followed by analyses of examples of codeswitching in community school teacher-pupil interaction. They do not consider teaching their ethnic language as important as teaching the socioeconomically important language (English) and their religious language (Quranic Arabic). The religious practices that they more fervently maintain, propagate, and reproduce, also influence their attitude towards the Japanese language. Meanwhile, neoliberalism and the history of South Asia as an ex-colony also play an important part in constructing their group identity without the ethnolinguistic identity, calling to attention the complexity of the association between language and power in migrant communities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines language ideology of the JSL (Japanese as a second language) classroom in ethnography. Focusing on the JSL teacher’s discourse, the relationship of social role and language ideology in the JSL classroom will be analysed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an attempt to examine how the JSL teacher negotiated her language ideologies in the classroom discourse and exercised covert power in the class. It is based on my longitudinal ethnographic research of how a sojourner child became a Korean and Japanese bilingual in the JSL (Japanese as a second language) classroom.
Education and general government administration are two large arenas in which language becomes a question of nationalism (Fasold 1984). The school I researched was Japanese local state school, therefore, the school education was designed for mainstream Japanese children and the language of instruction, the medium at the school, was Japanese. Once the sojourner Korean child enrolled in the school, he needed to learn Japanese, referred to as 'Nihongo [Japanese]' and also needed the subject of Japanese, referred to as 'Kokugo [National language]'. This discourse of double 'Japanese languages' designated the nature of JSL classroom.
More than teaching language, the JSL teachers are expected to teach: oral and written, informal and formal, conversational for the communication with peers and academic for the subject. Working on these complex tasks in the JSL classroom, the teacher negotiated with the roles of 'school teacher' and 'bilingual individual'. In the role of teacher, her instruction of Japanese language reflected the power over the pupil.
This paper examines ethnography of JSL classroom in depth, where the language ideology in the classroom discourse will be analysed.