Ainu language use and display in the National Ainu Museum
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Saana Santalahti
Abstract
Based on a critical analysis of the museum’s linguistic landscape and a discourse analysis of the museum texts, this paper explores how the Indigenous Ainu language is both used and displayed in the National Ainu Museum and discusses how these observations relate to the museum’s overt language policy and potential role as a site for Ainu language revitalisation. Though Ainu has been announced as the official first language of the museum, this study suggests that there is incongruity between overt policy and practice. While Ainu is clearly the symbolic first language, in practice Japanese and English are the museum’s two main languages, echoing the different functions and values associated with these languages. Although the museum is participating in concrete language maintenance initiatives, the exhibition texts discuss language revitalisation as a purely linguistic campaign, detaching it from broader contemporary society and Indigenous rights issues. These findings show how language use and display in museums are connected to the surrounding ideologies and policies, but do not necessarily need to be confined by them.
Funding source: The Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: RG21-0001
Funding source: Suomen Kulttuurirahasto
Award Identifier / Grant number: 00231043
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my PhD project supervisors Docent Riikka Länsisalmi (University of Helsinki), Docent Ekaterina Gruzdeva (University of Helsinki) and Professor Jeffry Gayman (Hokkaido University) for their feedback and suggestions throughout the writing of this paper (any mistakes and shortcomings remain my own). I am also grateful to Silja Ijas (Hokkaido University) for help and comments, as well as Mika Fukazawa, Miki Kobayashi, Mark Winchester and Haruna Yazaki (National Ainu Museum) for co-operation during the data collection. The data collection for this study was made possible with a grant from the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation (Grant Number RG20-0002). My PhD project, of which this paper is a part of, has been funded by the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Grant Number 00231043).
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- Negotiating sociolinguistic justice: turning spaces of inequality into spaces of conscientization
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- Varia
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Negotiating sociolinguistic justice: turning spaces of inequality into spaces of conscientization
- Talking about sociolinguistic injustice: critical ethnographies towards speaker conscientization
- Spaces of conscientization as a bridge between inequality and contestation
- Voicing experiences of language surveillance to challenge social inequality
- Agency as doing-together: learning from fieldwork experiences
- Varia
- Relevance and effectiveness in translation planning into minoritized languages: an evaluation of translation subsidies in the Galician publishing industry
- Ainu language use and display in the National Ainu Museum
