East Asian Linguistics Workshop: Kazuko Matsumoto, "Transplanted Japanese in the colonial diaspora: Dialect, language contact, and obsolescence"

Professor Matsumoto will report on early results from her research with David Britain at the University of Bern on structural obsolescence in the postcolonial Japanese variety spoken on Palau in the Western Pacific. During Japanese rule (1914-1945), radically different dialects of Japanese were brought by settlers, who eventually accounted for the vast majority of the population in the capital Koror. Due to intensive contact with the children of these settlers, many Palauan children acquired a Japanese colonial koiné as part of their linguistic repertoire. In 1945, all Japanese settlers were expatriated, with English becoming the official colonial language. Today just a few very elderly Palauans survive to remind us of the once vibrant Japanese speech community. Two comparable data sets from 28 elderly Palauans collected in 1998 and 2010 are analysed in order to examine in which direction Palauan Japanese is travelling, as obsolescence progresses, with attention to the effects of substrate Palauan phonology, the demography and dialectology of Japanese settlers, and the speakers’ original command of the language.

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Kazuko Matsumoto is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Language and Information Sciences in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Professor Matsumoto's research is interdisciplinary, lying at the intersection of sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic anthropology. Her main interests are language variation and change (especially, in settlement contexts). Grounded in the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm, she has been investigating dialect contact and koineisation, new dialect formation, dialect acquisition and dialect obsolescence (e.g., Japanese dialect contact and obsolescence in Palau and Peru).

She is also interested in contact linguistics (especially, in colonial and migrant/immigrant contexts); the linguistic consequences of language contact, such as language maintenance and shift (in postcolonial multilingual Palau and Nikkei Mexican communities in Mexico City), contact-induced borrowing (loanwords in Palauan), nativisation of newly emerging varieties of colonial languages (Palauan English) and ethnolect formation in multicultural immigrant communities (Nikkei Latino immigrant communities in Japan).