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Summary
1. Introduction
2. The
situation of English in Japan
2.1.
Linguistic proficiency in English
2.2.
Learning
2.3.
Use of English
3. Linguistic ideology
4. Conclusion
5. Bibliography
1.
Introduction
Japanese is a de
facto official language in Japan. This is the case because, although it has a
wide-spread social use, there is no legislation defining it as an official language. For
everyday life, there is no need to know any language other than Japanese. However, this
does not mean that Japan is an entirely monolingual state. We will now turn to look at the
linguistic structure of Japan.
Japanese is
spoken by some 125,000,000 individuals, and is the ninth most spoken language in the
world, after Portuguese (170,000,000 speakers). Japan also has at least two other native
languages, in addition to Japanese: Ainu and the language of Okinawa. The number of
speakers of these two languages is uncertain, but it is believed that Ainu has tens of
hundreds and that the language of Okinawa has hundreds of thousands. In addition to these
native languages, foreign languages such as Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Philippine,
Spanish, English, Thai, etc. are also spoken. We do not know exactly how many individuals
speak these languages, but we can use the numbers of foreigners on record as a reference.
Table
1. Number of Foreigners Registered in Japan (Year 2000)
Nationality |
Number |
Korean (North and South) |
635,269 |
Chinese |
335,575 |
Brazilian |
254,394 |
Philippine |
144,871 |
Peruvian |
46,171 |
North-American (United States) |
44,856 |
Thai |
29,289 |
Indonesian |
19,346 |
Vietnamese |
16,908 |
British |
16,525 |
Source:
Own work based on data taken from the official website of the Ministry of Justice (1)
Overall, there
were 1,686,444 foreigners registered in Japan in the year 2000. In all probability,
therefore, the language of the vast majority of the Japanese population is indeed
Japanese, since the sum of the speakers of these native and foreign languages barely
reaches 2% of the total population. Moreover, almost all speakers of Ainu and the language
of Okinawa, and the majority of Korean speakers are bilingual with Japanese.
If we consider
that languages other than Japanese are not required in everyday life and that the speakers
of these languages are few in number, it seems logical that there is no official language
legislation. However, the fact is that a number of proposals to legislate the language
have been made. The latest proposal with a certain social impact was published in the year
2000 in a report drawn up by the advisory committee of the Prime Minister, Obuti (2) which called for the
promotion of English as a national strategy, with a view to equipping it with official
status in the long-term. Subsequently, Youichi Funabashi, journalist and member of this
committee, published a paper in which he proposed a language act to define Japanese as the
first official language and English as the second (Funabashi : 2000).
Why have these
seemingly illogical proposals been made? What has been their social impact? Reflection and
analysis of this phenomenon may offer us a vision of the sociolinguistic situation of
English in Japan. We will now, therefore, turn to the main details of this subject. |