The Social Life of the Japanese Language: Cultural Discourse and Situated Practice

Description

Why are different varieties of the Japanese language used differently in social interaction, and how are they perceived? How do honorifics operate to express diverse affective stances, such as politeness? Why have issues of gendered speech been so central in public discourse, and how are they reflected and refracted in language use as social practice? This book examines Japanese sociolinguistic phenomena from a fascinating new perspective, focusing on the historical construction of language norms and its relationship to actual language use in contemporary Japan. This socio-historically sensitive account stresses the different choices which have shaped Japanese and Western sociolinguistics and how varieties of Japanese, honorifics and politeness, and gendered language have emerged in response to the socio-political landscape in which a modernizing Japan found itself.

Shigeko Okamoto is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Her areas of research include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and functional grammar. She has published numerous articles on Japanese language and gender, honorifics, regional dialects, grammaticization and grammatical constructions. She is a co-editor of the volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology (with Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, 2004). Her latest interest is in semiotic diversity and multiplicity and its relationship to language ideologies. Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is a specialist in Japanese language, society and culture, with an emphasis on the interaction between ideology and practice. Publications include Japanese Women's Language (1985) and the edited volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology (with Shigeko Okamoto, 2004). Her latest long-time interest in language and gender has merged with studies of contemporary cultural models of femininity/masculinity and romantic love through textual analyses of popular print and televisual materials.