The study of politeness and women’s language in Japan

Abstract

Japan is a group of islands dotting the Pacific Rim. It is a multilingual polity extending for almost 3,000 kilometres from Ainu Mosir (Hokkaido) in the north to the Ryukyu Islands in the south. Standard Japanese is the dominant language.1 With more than 130 million first-and second-language speakers, Japanese is amongst the largest languages in the world. As an effect of urbanization and the influence of mass media, extensive dialect levelling has occurred in Japanese. The shift to Standard Japanese is also endangering Japan’s indigenous languages – such as Ainu, Hachijo and the Ryukyuan languages – as well as Japanese Sign Language. Japanese, Hachijo and the Ryukyuan languages form the Japonic language family. Ainu is a language isolate. This chapter first discusses the development of sociolinguistic studies in Japan. Inorder to meaningfully do so it is imperative to understand the reception and application of Western sociolinguistics in Japan, as we will see in the course of this chapter. Afterwards the study of politeness and women’s language in Japan will be discussed. In doing so, it will become clear that Japan may apply models developed in Western sociolinguistics to Japanese but that it will maintain the perspective on Japanese language and society as set forth in its own sociolinguistic tradition. As an effect, modernist Japanese language ideology finds entry into this kind of research, and this stalls the development for more thorough investigations. This is also a problem because this kind of Japanese research then feeds back into mainstream sociolinguistic theory. It furthers the “exotification” of Japan and the Japanese language (e.g. Holmes 1992; Talbot 1998).Japan can draw on a notable pre-modern tradition of linguistic research. Buddhist studies, the heritage of classical Chinese culture through Confucian studies, the philological work of the so-called school of kokugogakusha (“national philologists”or “Edo nativists”) and translations at Court were the main sources of pre-modern linguistic studies. In particular, the work of the Edo nativists found entry into Japanese modern linguistics (Eschbach-Szabo 2000). The introduction of Western linguistics to Japan was never simply a transfer of information. It was a selection, interpretation and adaptation of Western linguistics according to the necessities, research gaps and the dominant ideologies existing in Japan. Indigenous and Western approaches coexist on all levels of description and all linguistic sub-disciplines (pragmatics, sociolinguistics, grammar, etc.). At times, although rather rarely, attempts have been made to unify indigenous and Western approaches (Heinrich 2002a). As a result, sociolinguistics in Japan is not a unified, monolithic discipline. Different traditions coexist and come up with different approaches and results.