„Die beste und schönste Sprache der Welt”

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeAbstractThis paper deals with one of many proposals in modern Japan to replace the Japanese language with another language. While most proposals were made in the Meiji period, Shiga Naoya, a cultural icon of the Taishō and Shōwa period, set forth his scheme to have Japanese replaced with French in 1946. In a short essay, translated in this present paper for the first time, Shiga reiterates ideological views about language and Japanese, which have their basis in orientalism. According to such beliefs, Japanese is an incomplete and deficient language which stands in the way of developing the Japanese nation. Shiga mixes these views with modern ideologies of linguistic nationalism, thus arriving at a hybrid view on Japanese. While his scheme of solving language problems by introducing a Western language to Japan seems absurd, his essay is extremely interesting with regard to the study of language ideology, as it includes two specific language ideologies connected to Japanese. It is concluded that these ideologies cannot be treated independently when discussing Shiga's proposal, since the more recent ideology of linguistic nationalism was developed in reaction to ideologies already existing at that time. Shiga, in short, mixes up the orientalist view on Japanese with modern linguistic nationalism and, in doing so, provides us with a key to unlock both ideologies at the same time.