This class was taken at Okayama University in Okayama, Japan.
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Description:
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Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationships between language and society, including the way people use language in different contexts. Focusing on Japanese society, students will study the regional and social variations of language, language policies, and language ideology. This class is open to both international and Japanese students. Through discussions and fieldwork, students will learn from each other.
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Course Narrative
This class focused on sociology in a linguistic fashion. Through this course, I studied the implications of language and the perspectives that went with those implications. The course focused on the cultural variations in language, where a language can become less of the language of origin and more of its own thing, such as Piggin, a language spoken in Hawaii by a small number of natives born to various immigrant groups. This language originates from a variety of languages, such as Portuguese and Japanese, but it has a strong English background; for this reason, speakers of Piggin fought for acknowledgment of their language as its own tongue, rather than a disorganized dialect of English. One of the most interesting aspects of language and linguistics was looking at how a conversation's power is dispersed. Through every conversation, in any given language, there is a balance or imbalance of power between speakers and listeners. Going back to the case of Piggin, we find that some forms of asserted power are those who see things like Piggin as an inferior form of something that is perceived as being superior, thus a dialect or language such as Piggin is given less power, for its speakers and for its usage throughout society. This balance of power is also within the smallest conversation, being a balance between who is speaking and who is listening, and that can tip the scales for whoever uses what dialect and in what circumstance (see sample paper). I found that this was prevalent in Japanese when it came to dialect. I was surprised to find through research that many Japanese believe Tokyo Dialect to be basically Standard Japanese, which it is and is not. Standard Japanese being very similar to Tokyo Dialect does not discredit the dialect's existence. Tokyo Dialect is unique to its area, and has unique sub-dialects within it. However, the use of the dialect of the country's capital has landed it in a spot that allots it in the eyes of Japanese people as the standard form of Japanese language (see sample presentation).
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