Foreigner talk eller foreignness? - Västerlänningars språk i japansk skönlitteratur

Författare

Erik Brockstedt Oskarsson

Summary, in Swedish

The present study seeks, with a corpus of eight Japanese works of fiction, to identify if the speech patterns of Westerners in Japanese literature have their origins in the simplified register referred to as “foreigner talk”, i.e. the register used to address non-native speakers with low linguistic competence, and also if foreigner talk is commonly used in Japanese literature for addressing non-native speakers. It was found that, although all of the authors somehow marked the characters’ nationality with the language, for example by use of loanwords – i.e. markers of “foreignness”, the language of the Westerners was rarely portrayed as “simplified”. When the language was depicted as “simpler” than standard Japanese, the characters were in most of the cases of minor importance to the story. In some works, the Japanese characters use a simplified language towards foreigners, but the language has differences from the simplifications reported in studies of real Japanese foreigner talk. The modifications reported were in most cases of syntactic nature (short sentences and repetitions to facilitate comprehension), while for example morphologic simplifications rarely occurred. However, the modifications were not frequent enough to be called conventionalized.

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