The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese

Kazuko Matsumoto; David Britain

doi:10.1515/ijsl-2021-0010

Article

The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese

Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain

Published/Copyright: February 16, 2022

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From the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language Volume 2022 Issue 273

Abstract

Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of linguistic, perceptual, historical and sociodemographic data as well as two decades of sociolinguistic ethnography collected among the postcolonial Japanese speech communities of Palau in the Pacific, this article argues that Palauan Japanese was not simply ‘standard Japanese transported’, but a koineised vernacular variety of Japanese; i.e., a variety resulting from the mixture of different migrant dialects, which was adopted by Palauans through daily interaction with local Japanese settlers during the colonial period. The article concludes by emphasising: (a) the usefulness of teasing apart varieties largely acquired and consolidated through everyday communication with target language speakers from varieties mastered largely through formal schooling; (b) the importance of understanding the social contexts in which ‘new’ colonial varieties are formed as well as the linguistic outcomes of the dialect mixing that occurs when a numerically dominant but dialectally diverse settler population colonises a new territory; and (c) the helpfulness of speech perception and social identification experiments as tools to identify vernacularity.

Keywords: dialect contact; diaspora Japanese; koineisation; Micronesia; Palau; postcolonial Japanese

Corresponding author: Kazuko Matsumoto, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, E-mail: kmatsu@boz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Funding source: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science 10.13039/501100001691

Award Identifier / Grant number: 15720097

Award Identifier / Grant number: 16H03412

Award Identifier / Grant number: 18720100

Award Identifier / Grant number: 22682003

Award Identifier / Grant number: 25580085

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those in Palau who kindly co-operated with our research, as well as Shuichi Yatabe, Mizuho Hidaka and Shoichi Yokomaya for their useful advice; the audience at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 21 for their feedback and comments; and our research assistants Akiko Okumura and Yue Teng for assisting with our analysis of the textbooks used in Palauan schools and for creating our Japanese dialect map. We would particularly like to thank David Hornsby for his extremely thorough critical reading of the text – his suggestions have certainly helped us frame our argument more sharply.

Research funding: This work was funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (15720097, 16H03412, 18720100, 22682003, 25580085).

Appendix

Speakers sampled by ethnicity, gender and competence in this research.

Ethnicity	Palauan		Japanese-Palauan		TOTAL
Gender	Male	Female	Male	Female	TOTAL
Fluent speaker (born between 1920 and 1929)	12	12	9	12	45
Semi-speaker (born between 1933 and 1939)	4	6	4	4	18
Rememberers (born between 1940 and 1948)	2	3	2	2	9
Total	18	21	15	18	72

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Received: 2021-01-14

Accepted: 2021-11-08

Published Online: 2022-02-16

Published in Print: 2022-01-27

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2021-0010

Keywords for this article

dialect contact; diaspora Japanese; koineisation; Micronesia; Palau; postcolonial Japanese