Baffled foreign tourists get little help on trains Although Asian tourists are flocking to Japan in greater numbers, many are at a loss in railway stations, where few signs are written in languages other than Japanese and English. Japan Times, 23 May, 2014.
Speaking in tongues with many a twist: Japanese has been standardized, but its dialects survive and thrive An article about the different regional varieties of Japanese, and the attempts to standardise them into one national Japanese language in the 19th and 20th centuries. Japan Times, March 31, 2002.
Let's improve language education for migrants A Point of View article by Akito Ozaki, chairman of the Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language. Ozaki looks at the problems facing foreign residents in Japan in the economic downturn and arguments the government should have a policy to provide Japanese language education for them. The Asahi Shimbun, April 16, 2009.
Japanese-Brazilian families: a failure to communicate This article looks at the problems of communication at home caused when the children of Nikkei ( Japanese-Brazilian) parents in Japan attend Japanese schools and grow up speaking Japanese, not Portuguese, as their first language. It also argues that learning their Portuguese mother tongue is important for positive identity formation and positive learning experiences for these children and looks at some policies to support the learning of Portuguese by Japanese-Brazilian children in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka. Japan Times, Aug. 1, 2008.
Efforts to preserve Ainu language gain momentum An independent television producer and an Ainu-language teacher recently released a compact disc featuring traditional Ainu stories in a bid to pass down the indigenous minority’s language. Japan Times, 15 Jun, 2002.
>>> More on Ainu language issues and policies >>>
Okinawans push to preserve unique language Uchinaguchi, spoken in the southern half of the main island of Okinawa, is for the most part completely unintelligible to most Japanese. Even Okinawans who grew up speaking standard Japanese consider Uchnaguchi just a dialect, something subordinate to Japanese, and some people expect the language to be extinct in a few decades. Japan Times, 19 May 2012.
In Japan’s Okinawa, saving indigenous languages is about more than words This article looks at the current situation and history of Okinawan and other Ryukuan languages, at discussions about their connections with Okinawan identity, and briefly at debates about what it means to save an endangered language. Washington Post, 29 Nov 2014.
>>> More on Okinawan language issues and policies >>>