The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese

Matsumoto, Kazuko; Britain, David (2022). The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese. International journal of the sociology of language, 2022(273), pp. 103-144. Oxford: Mouton de Gruyter 10.1515/ijsl-2021-0010

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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.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > Modern English Linguistics
UniBE Contributor:	Matsumoto, Kazuko, Britain, David
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 400 Language 400 Language > 410 Linguistics 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages
ISSN:	1613-3668
Publisher:	Mouton de Gruyter
Language:	English
Submitter:	Federico Erba
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2022 12:34
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:31
Publisher DOI:	10.1515/ijsl-2021-0010
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/172177