Cultural Pluralism in Japan: A Sociolinguistic Outline

Page No.: 
5
Writer(s): 
Nobuyuki Honna

 

Japan is generally said to be a monoethnic,
mono-cultural, and monO-lingual
society. But it is not true. In this
short paper, I would like to speak for
a small number of people in Japan who
have started to reconsider the Japanese
social structure in terms of linguistic
and cultural pluralism. Our observation
will be, then, from a worm's-eyeview,
rather than from a bird's-eyeview,
because a localized down-to-earth
point of view is essential when we try
to understand human struggles for selfidentity.
I will choose six sociolinguistic
topics from the fields in which
modal ism of the deaf between sign language
and spoken language, 2) bidia1ectalism
in a mu1tidia1ecta1 society,
3) significant differences in the way
language is used between urban and rural
children, 4-5) Ainu and Korean minorities,
and 6) foreign language education.
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