John Maher

Multilingual Japan John Maher

Linguistic diversity is part of the heritage of Japan: an archipelago of over 3,000 islands from the 'new territories' of Hokkaido in the north to the southern Ryukyu islands. This book presents a new outlook on the language situation in Japan. It provides a sociolinguistic profile of the language situation of the older mother tongues such as Ryukyuan and Ainu, community languages such as Korean, English and Chinese and presents issues such as bilingual families and 'returnee' language maintenance. The book rejects the oft-repeated stereotyping of Japan as a 'linguistically homogeneous nation with a difficult language' particularly in the English-language literature and challenges the post-Meiji period endeavour to establish Japanese 'identity' in terms of monolingual integrity. Through the perspective of these studies, Japan may be viewed as being multilingual and as linguistically complex as many other regions of the world.