Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics

Patrick Heinrich, Yumiko Ohara, Patrick Heinrich, Yumiko Ohara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351818391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Presenting new approaches and results previously inaccessible in English, the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics provides an insight into the language and society of contemporary Japan from a fresh perspective.

While it was once believed that Japan was a linguistically homogenous country, research over the past two decades has shown Japan to be a multilingual and sociolinguistically diversifying country. Building on this approach, the contributors to this handbook take this further, combining Japanese and western approaches alike and producing research which is relevant to twenty-first century societies. Organised into five parts, the sections covered include:

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• The languages and language varieties of Japan.

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• The multilingual ecology.

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• Variation, style and interaction.

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• Language problems and language planning.

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• Research overviews.

With contributions from across the field of Japanese sociolinguistics, this handbook will prove very useful for students and scholars of Japanese Studies, as well as sociolinguists more generally.

Part I

The languages and language varieties of Japan

1

Ainu language and Ainu speakers

Mika Fukazawa

Introduction

The Ainu language is an endangered language in Japan. It has traditionally been spoken in Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Today, there remain only a few speakers in Hokkaido, who learned vocabularies from their parents or grandparents and who can use simple sentences in Ainu. Nobody speaks only Ainu in everyday life anymore. Ainu is well documented through the works of explorers, doctors, exiles, scholars, etc. For a long time, Ainu people have traded with (ethnic) Japanese (wajin) – the majority population of Japan. As an effect of such contacts, Japanese and Ainu have adopted loanwords from one another. In the Edo Period (1603–1868), Ainu-Japanese translators (Ezo tsūji) were stationed in various areas of Hokkaido to facilitate trade, and they recorded a number of Ainu language materials. These written materials are important not only for second language learning today, they are also important resources for the study of Ainu-Japanese language contact.

In this chapter, I describe the Ainu language and its speakers by making references to audio and written materials collected since the Edo Period. I will first discuss studies on Ainu language and dialects, and then loanwords in Japanese and Ainu. This will be followed by a summary of phonetic interferences, social and geographic variation, language and economy, attitudes towards language standardization and the various Ainu orthographies that were proposed in the past 150 years. The topics this chapter addresses are somewhat scattered and the information is often incomplete. This is due to the fact that sociolinguistic approaches have never been prominent in Ainu studies. This notwithstanding, by putting this information together, a number of sociolinguistic insights on Ainu can be gained.

Studies on Ainu vocabulary, grammar and dialect division

Early studies by explorers and missionaries

Before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a number of visitors, missionaries and translators provided some of the earliest information available on Ainu (for details, see Murayama 1971; Refsing 1996). The Italian Jerome de Angelis visited Hokkaido in 1618 and 1621, compiling a word list of 54 Ainu words on this occasion. In the eighteenth century, Stephan Petrovich Krascheninnikov and Georg Wilhelm Steller participated in a Russian expedition that explored Kamchatka. They each edited a Kuril Ainu glossary. Steller’s word list was never published, but the orientalist Julius von Klaproth referred to his work in his seminal Asia Polyglotta of 1823.¹ In 1785, the French explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse traveled around the world and as a result of his meeting with Ainu in Sakhalin, he also compiled an Ainu glossary.² In 1803, Adam Johann von Krusenstern visited Sakhalin, meeting Gavriil Ivanovich Davydov there on this occasion. Davydov’s Ainu glossary was subsequently included in Krusenstern’s works ([1813]1971; see also Refsing 1996: 4, 33). A landmark in these early studies is the aforementioned Asia Polyglotta by Klaproth ([1823]1971). It included Ainu vocabularies from the Kurils, Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Klaproth never collected any vocabularies himself, but assembled materials collected by Krasheninnikov and Steller for the Kuril dialect, by Davydov for the Taraika dialect in Sakhalin and by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff for the Sakhalin dialect and the Hokkaido dialect. Refsing (1996: 5) writes that Klaproth’s “work appears to have been first attempt to classify dialects and thus also to subject the Ainu language to more scientific scrutiny”.

In the modern period, contacts with Westerners became closer and more frequent. The Polish zoologist Benedykt Dybowski lived in Kamchatka as a doctor from 1879 to 1883, and he collected vocabularies from various local communities on this occasion (Dyboski [1892]1971). His vocabulary of Ainu in the Shumushu Island was published in Radlinski (1892). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Polish researcher Bronisław Piłsudski made the first audio recordings of Sakhalin Ainu and Hokkaido Ainu on wax-tube cylinders. The British missionary John Batchelor began his study of Ainu while living in Biratori in Hokkaido. Batchelor also translated the Bible into Ainu. Covering a span of more than 60 years, Batchelor published more than 30 works on Ainu language, folklore and customs. The most famous of these is his Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary (Batchelor [1889]1975).

Modern studies of Ainu

The first ever Japanese-Ainu dictionary, Moshiogusa (1792), was edited by Uehara Kumajirō and Abe Chozaburō. In this dictionary, we find various entries that employ the sign <▲>. It is used to separate Ainu terms that differ across dialects. For example, in case of the entry of “tongue”, this symbol separates parunpe and aw. Parunpe is used in most Hokkaido dialects, while aw is used in the Sakhalin dialects and in some northern Hokkaido dialects. Unfortunately, the dictionary does not state which dialects the entries reflect. In order to understand this, one needs to contrast it with other materials such as Hattori’s (1964) Ainu dialect dictionary.

In the twentieth century, Kindaichi Kyōsuke started his fieldwork in Hokkaido and Sakhalin. His studies resulted in the first ever grammar sketch of Ainu. Ainu studies later developed mainly due to the works of his students such as Hattori Shirō and Chiri Mashiho. From the onset, Ainu studies have been marked with a sense of urgency. Consider the following remark by Hattori on the sociolinguistic situation of the 1950s:

In April of 1955, commissioned by the Japanese Society of Ethnology, Dr. Chiri Mashiho and I traveled all over Hokkaido for 25 days, investigating 15 dialects of Ainu from a glottochronological point of view. We found that the language was on the point of dying out. Some of the informants were the last surviving speaker or speakers of a dialect, and all of them were very old. Some informants spoke Ainu fluently – others spoke imperfectly and were unable to remember several words. This situation reminded me of the urgency to organize a fieldwork team in order to investigate the Ainu dialects systematically before they would become completely extinct.

(Hattori 1964: 37)

Hattori and Chiri (1960) had initially planned to conduct lexicostatistic studies of altogether 19 Ainu dialects. In Hattori’s 1964 Ainu dialect dictionary, the data of eight dialects and Tori’i Ryūzō’s (1903) work on the Kuril dialect were incorporated, but 11 dialects could not be considered due to either insufficient funds to conduct studies or due to insufficient proficiency on the side of the informants. The Kuril dialects became extinct in the early twentieth century, which is why some of the Kuril entries had to draw on Tori’i’s data. Hattori and Chiri did also provide for classification of Ainu dialect division. They distinguished between the following dialects.³

a.The Hokkaido dialects differ from the Sakhalin dialects, and they each form a dialectal group.

b.The Soya dialect is closest to the Sakhalin dialects among Hokkaido dialects, and it is somewhat isolated. The Nayoro, Asahikawa, Biratori, Nikappu and Horobetsu dialects in Hokkaido are relatively close to the Sakhalin dialects, though it is unclear what these dialectal similarities mean (historically and linguistically) […].

c.The Hokkaido dialects may be divided into three larger subgroups: Yakumo and Oshamambe; Nukibetsu, Biratori and Nikappu; Obihiro, Kushiro and Bihoro.

d.In the Hidaka area, the Samani dialect is isolated from the Nikappu, Biratori, Nukibetsu (and Horobetsu) dialects. Possibly, this is significant, since it is said that southern Hidaka (including Samani) is different from northern Hidaka (Nikappu, Biratori and Nukibetsu) in terms of the manners and customs. Note that the Samani dialect is rather closely related to the Obihiro and Kushiro dialects in eastern Hokkaido (Hattori and Chiri 1960: 338–340).

Asai (1974) conducted a cluster analysis of the Ainu dialects, using the list of 200 words of basic vocabulary provided by Hattori and Chiri (1960) and by other written materials on the Kuril dialect (Tori’i 1903; Murayama 1971; Pinart 1872, transcribed by Asai 1974), as well as his own data of the Chitose dialect in Hokkaido (Asai 1974).⁴ Note that Asai (1974) made some modification on the data on the Asahikawa, Obihiro and Kushiro dialects on the basis of new information by native speakers. As a result of his cluster analysis, Asai (1974) proposed a division of the Ainu dialects as Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1Division of Ainu dialects

Source: Asai (1974).

Nakagawa Hiroshi (1996) applied a geolinguistic approach to the study of Ainu.⁵ Based on data from Hattori and Chiri (1960) and Hattori (1964), he distinguished between six types: Eastern-Western, ABA (dialect B sandwiched between two dialect A areas), Sakhalin (and Kuril), Saru-Chitose (and Sakhalin), Eastern-Ezo and Western-Ezo.⁶ As Hattori and Chiri (1960) had already suggested, the Saru-Chitose type is a particular case. The Saru and Chitose dialects differ from the other Hokkaido dialects and share a large number of cognates with Sakhalin dialects. The exact historical relationship between Saru-Chitose and Sakhalin remains unclear.

Nakagawa’s (1996) “East-West type” relates to a well-known geographical distribution that had already been reported by Hattori and Chiri (1960...