Volume 2022, Issue 273 - Special Issue: Diaspora Japanese; Issue Editors: Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain

In introducing this special issue on Japanese outside of Japan, this article sets the scene by providing an overview of the genesis and trajectories of the Japanese diaspora which examines the history of international population movements, demographic transitions, educational orientations and language situations in the resulting communities. It touches upon: (a) the disappearance of the oldest nihon machi (Japan towns) formed by fleeing samurai and traders as refugee and trade diasporas; (b) the emergence of Nikkei (Japanese ancestry) identities in Japanese labour diaspora communities; (c) the obsolescence of varieties of Japanese learnt/acquired during childhood in imperial diaspora contexts, along with the employment and integration of Japanese borrowings in the local languages; (d) the contrast in the social lives and language situations in global Japanese diaspora communities between affluent long-term residents living within Japanese norms, on the one hand, and, on the other, permanent residents seeking personal freedom from these norms; and (e) the contrasting social realities in contemporary Japan of returnee children of Japanese diplomats and expatriate Japanese business executives as a new privileged class, on the one hand, and returnee Nikkei Latin Americans working as foreign labourers in Japan, on the other. Given the wide range of historical and socio-economic contexts in which the Japanese diaspora found itself, we conclude that it continues to provide a rich seam of potential sociolinguistic enquiry, which may provide an illustrative framework serving as a possible model for the historicised analysis of diasporic sociolinguistic complexities in other world contexts.

This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is known for its unique phonology compared to other Japanese dialects and, for this reason, it is often stigmatized. Previous studies of second dialect acquisition have suggested that older speakers tend to retain the phonological features of their original dialects during dialect contact situations. The results from adult Japanese plantation immigrants, as expected, suggested that adult Tōhoku dialect speakers demonstrated limitations in acquiring second dialect phonology in their contact with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers. However, there are different degrees of second dialect acquisition between the intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers among the Tōhoku dialect immigrants who interacted with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers on a daily basis and those who did not; namely, the former eliminated the stereotypical stigmatized Tōhoku dialect feature – the mergers – more than those speakers who did not have such frequent interaction. This suggests that both sociolinguistic factors, e.g., dialect discrimination by peers, as well as relative phonological complexity, influence the rates of second dialect acquisition.

The present study examines the relationship between language and generation among Japanese Americans during World War II by focusing on an example of the rarely studied ethnic press called the Utah Nippoo (“Utah Daily News”). In the difficult period of the war between the United States and Japan, Japanese Americans in Utah were generally successful in dealing with the gap between the first generation’s Japanese nationalism and the second generation’s American citizenship. The Utah Nippoo honored both a pro-Japan stance and a pro-American stance by allowing editorial freedom for each language section, yet maintaining cohesion and keeping the generations together. Data explicated in this study, which focuses on institutional talk, suggests that the linguistic gap between the Japanese-dominant first generation and the English-dominant second generation does not necessarily lead to generational tension if appropriate measures such as the use of linguistic politeness strategies are considered. This study will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between a relatively understudied language such as Japanese and acculturation among immigrants in the United States, with our focus on linguistic politeness.

This article reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant community in Mexico City – pre-war labour migrants and recent self-movers. We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities. The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of their heritage language in both old and new migrant communities, while highlighting the community-specific effects of both age and languages used in the workplace among the old community and those of contact with relatives and friends in Japan in the case of the newcomer community. We argue that these differences indicate that in the older community, where a strong solidarity network has been developed but where contact with relatives in Japan has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help them maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with their relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of their high language ability. This article concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whereas different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with relatives and friends in the homeland, may aid in its preservation, depending upon the recency of the community’s arrival as well as the strength of community’s network.

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.

This paper explores the effects of social networks on the reported language proficiency of three groups of New Zealand Japanese children. Drawing on a quantitative analysis of data collected from questionnaire-based interviews, this study reveals that children of sojourner families and children of immigrant families of mixed and non-mixed backgrounds, each with their differing levels of reported Japanese proficiency, benefit from different types of social networks. The results found that sojourner networks are important for sojourner children’s Japanese language proficiency. For this group, wider types of contact with the New Zealand Japanese community show little positive effects. These findings contrast with that of Japanese immigrants where community social networks show a diverse range of positive effects on the reported Japanese proficiency of children from mixed and non-mixed family backgrounds. The findings suggest that researchers should give further consideration into the differing effects of social networks on different subgroups within diasporic communities.

This study analyses the translanguaging patterns of urban Cameroonians’ linguistic choices (e.g. lexical or phonological) in everyday conversations in Cameroon. Using observation and audio-recordings of 20 naturally occurring conversations as data, a descriptive corpus-based methodology was adopted for analysis. The quantitative approach utilises AntConc (Version 3.5.8) with descriptive analytical tools to identify the speakers’ idiolectal choices in meaning-making translanguaging patterns. The results revealed salient patterns of the speakers’ deployed lexical, grammatical, morphological, phonological and syntactical forms as an integrated system of language. It revealed the speakers preference for polysemous words (e.g. repe ) over less polysemous words (e.g. father ); choice for shorter lexical words (e.g. man ) over longer words (e.g. manpikin ); a preference for specialised gender-neutral markers (e.g. ih, which refers to both male and female) over gender-specific forms (e.g. he/she ); a preference for voiceless interdental fricatives (e.g. dem, dey ) over voiced interdental fricatives (e.g. them, they ) and where the choice of inflectional morpheme expressing tense (e.g. ed ) is one that can either be omitted or added to a word, the presence of this inflectional morpheme is sometimes fairly used. Such results have practical implications for understanding peoples’ language use as a translanguaging act in bi/multilingual contexts.