Nonconventional script choice in Japan
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Nicolas Tranter
Abstract
The complexity and plurality of scripts and writing devices, such as auxiliary text or “ruby,” used in nonconventional writing in Japan are outlined, and various aspects, such as the use of loan scripts, are shown to parallel aspects of spoken language contact. The complexity of Japanese writing overall is attributed to “indirect” language contact with languages encountered predominantly in written form, especially Literary Chinese in the past and English nowadays, to which the concept of “total availability” that R. A. Miller (1967) uses to characterize neologism in Japan is applied. Specific choices of script are described in terms of cultural stereotypes and Jakobson's (1960) functions of language. Advertising and manga are identified as the major sources of many nonconventional practices that then spread into youth writing and even popular fiction. In each point, there is a parallel between choices in spoken language and in script choice.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The sociolinguistics of script choice: an introduction
- Writing Tuareg — the three script options
- The Khom script of the Kommodam Rebellion
- A social orthography of identity: the N'ko literacy movement in West Africa
- The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst
- Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea
- Choosing how to write sign language: a sociolinguistic perspective
- Indexicality, voice, and context in the distribution of Cherokee scripts
- Script change in Azerbaijan: acts of identity
- Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments
- Nonconventional script choice in Japan
- Script choice among the Miao in China
- Emblems of independence: script choice in post-Soviet Turkmenistan
- Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, edited by Seth L. Sanders
