Language Regimes in Transformation: Future Prospects for German and Japanese in Science, Economy, and Politics (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 93)

Language Regimes in Transformation

≥

Contributions to the Sociology of Language

93

Editor

Joshua A. Fishman

Mouton de GruyterBerlin · New York

Language Regimesin Transformation

Future Prospects for Germanand Japanese in Science, Economy,and Politics

edited by

Florian Coulmas

Mouton de GruyterBerlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

�� Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelinesof the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language regimes in transformation : future prospects for Germanand Japanese in science, economy, and politics / edited by FlorianCoulmas.

p. cm. � (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 93)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-3-11-019158-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 3-11-019158-X (hardcover : alk. paper)1. Multilingualism. 2. Language policy. 3. Globalization.

I. Coulmas, Florian.P115.L363 20074041.2�dc22

2006037137

ISBN 978-3-11-019158-5ISSN 1861-0676

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the DeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internetat http://dnb.d-nb.de.

” Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 BerlinAll rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of thisbook may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the publisher.Printed in Germany.

This book is dedicated to , George, Ji í V. Neustupný, a pioneer of language planning research, who should have been there.

Preface

Over the past half-century international relations have intensified. Eco-nomic relations, commercial exchange, scientific cooperation, university partnerships, student exchange programmes have increased steadily. At the same time, however, the interest in foreign languages has been stagnant if not dwindling for some time, being eclipsed by the overwhelming impor-tance of English. A significant driving force of globalization, English has been instrumental in the commercialisation and marketisation of the world’s languages. As a result, English is becoming the only foreign lan-guage learnt and taught.

This is an issue concerning not only the shaping of international rela-tions but the future of a number of fully developed languages such as Ger-man and Japanese. At this time, both languages belong to the select group of the world’s languages that are suitable for scientific communication and, more generally, can be used in all communication domains. However, it is not clear that German and Japanese can sustain their full functional poten-tial if their own speakers are using them in certain domains with lesser fre-quency. The diverging prerogatives of borderless communication in a sin-gle language, on one hand, and maintaining highly cultivated all-purpose languages, on the other, are obvious. Whether there are any feasible an-swers to the question of how to reconcile them is not. This volume docu-ments in a precise, cross-disciplinary and international way the impact, particularly in science and technology, of the massive expansion of English medium delivery of higher education, and the increasing conceptualisation and organisation of the science and economy domains of public life accord-ing to categories and systems derived from English. Since these issues con-cern not just sociologists of language who study changing functional do-main allocations of languages, the present volume brings together experts from a variety of fields, sociolinguistics, pedagogy, philosophy und politi-cal science. This breadth of perspective helped to reveal the multifaceted nature of the ongoing adjustment of language regimes to today’s demand for international communication, the permeability of national borders, the fate of minorities, immigration and the consequent pluralisation of the so-cial fabric.

It is not as clear as it would seem whether English as the international lingua franca of science and economic transactions should or shouldn’t be

viii Preface

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welcomed. This book is meant as a contribution to the ongoing debate scru-tinizing and carefully weighing arguments from both points of view.

Acknowledgements

First drafts of the chapters of this book were presented at a symposium on “Language Regimes in Transformation” convened in late summer of 2005 on the beautiful campus of Gakushuin University in Tokyo. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Faculty of Law of Gakushuin University for acting as our hosts. One of its members, Takao Katsuragi, was involved in the planning of the symposium from the beginning. Thanks are also due to the discuss-ants who provided inspiring and insightful comments on our work after the presentations which contributed substantially to the finished product. They were Andrew Horvat, Goro Kimura and Daniel Long. That Joshua Fishman accepted this volume for inclusion in his prestigious “CSL” series is a mat-ter of great satisfaction to which three reviewers have contributed their share. The symposium was supported with a generous grant by the Japan Foundation which is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks go to Peter Backhaus who provided logistic support during the conference.

Florian Coulmas Tokyo, 5 June 2006

Contents

Preface vii

Notes on the contributors xi

On language policy in the age of globalization with good governance 1 Takao Katsuragi

Thrifty monolingualism and luxuriating plurilingualism? 19 Konrad Ehlich

Challenges for language policy in today’s Japan 33 Nanette Gottlieb

Is the promotion of languages such as German and Japanese 53 abroad still appropriate today? Ulrich Ammon

Japanese and German language education in the UK: 71 problems, parallels, and prospects Tessa Carroll

Changing economic values of German and Japanese 95 Fumio Inoue

The debate on English as an official language in Japan 115 Patrick Heinrich

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Remains of the day: language orphans and the decline of German as a medical lingua franca in Japan 141 John Maher

The case for choice – language preferences in Japanese 155 academic publishing Florian Coulmas

Tokio or Tokyo? Dschudo or Judo? On writing foreign names 173 Elmar Holenstein

Effects of globalization on minority languages in Europe – 191 focusing on Celtic languages Kiyoshi Hara

Index 207

Notes on the contributors

Ulrich AMMON, German Linguistics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duis-burg, Germany

Tessa CARROLL, Modern Languages and Cultures, Japanese Studies, Uni-versity of Sterling, United Kingdom

Florian COULMAS, German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo, Japan

Konrad EHLICH, German as a Foreign Language / Transnational Germanis-tics, LMU Munich, Germany

Nanette GOTTLIEB, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Kiyoshi HARA, Anthropology, Joshibi University of Art and Design, Tokyo, Japan

Patrick HEINRICH, Japanese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Cultural Studies, University Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

Elmar HOLENSTEIN, Yokohama, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Fumio INOUE, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, Meikai University, Sai-tama City, Japan

Takao KATSURAGI, Faculty of Law, Gakushuiin University, Tokyo, Japan

John MAHER, Graduate School, Division of Education, International Chris-tian University, Tokyo, Japan

On language policy in the age of globalization with good governance

Takao Katsuragi

1. Globalization with good governance

1.1. Conceptualizing globalization

There are four elements to be considered with regard to the concept of globalization. The first is the fact that globalization is often considered as Americanization and that the idea of globalization is closely connected with the so-called Washington Consensus, i.e. the policy recommendation for greater integration within a liberalized global economy. In order to realize it, the World Bank and the IMF demand of developing countries “condi-tionalities”, which means, for the most part, deregulation and liberalization, the creation of a macro-economic environment, and the increase of gov-ernment spending on education, health care and nutrition. The OECD rec-ommends economic policies with similar contents. However, these condi-tionalities are too demanding for developing countries. The World Bank and the IMF have been severely criticized for not helping developing coun-tries but actually exploiting them. In 1999, the WTO official meeting in Seattle gathered governmental representatives from over 130 countries, but at the same time attracted over 70,000 people labourers, citizens and NGOs – who protested, even with some violence, against the policy of liberalizing world trade. This incident symbolized the whole picture of what globaliza-tion brings about, or the benefits and dangers of globalization. The overall and long-term effects of globalization are beneficial, but in the short term hasty globalization is harmful, especially for developing countries.

Secondly, there is the coexistence of globalization and the growth of re-ligious and ethnic movements. Globalization is often compared with mod-ernization. Modernization theories assume that to modernize a society means to secularize it. Thus, modernization has been characterized as secu-larization. Modernization also has an aspect of nation-building, which means that to modernize a society is to make it a nation-state, various eth-nic groups into one nation. Compared with modernization as secularization and nation-building, globalization seems to coexist with religion and eth-nicity. Formerly, when globalization was characterized exclusively as mar-

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ketization and Americanization, it was thought to be equivalent to a mature form of modernization. That is, globalization was thought to be the realiza-tion of a world market and worldly (Americanized) nation-building. How-ever, of late, this kind of thinking has gradually been revised. The reason is because religious and ethnic movements have become more intensified as globalization proceeds. What we are witnessing today is the global rise of religion and ethnicity. Although this might be viewed as a defensive reac-tion against globalization, the reality is more complicated and any simplifi-cation should be avoided. Even in Europe, religious and ethnic traditions are not simply dissolved by globalization, but rather remain constitutive dimensions of European societies. Moreover, globalization is a global mar-ketization for all kinds of goods and services, including religion and ethnic-ity. In this sense, it is quite natural for religion and ethnicity to proliferate through global mechanisms such as the Internet. Thus, as Spohn (2004: 84) argues, “it would be misleading to interpret the global rise of religious and ethnic nationalism as an anti-global, anti-western defense of threatened traditional societies with their religious and ethnic identities.” Rather, it should be seen as the upsurge of democratic and liberalizing movements, which are inherent in the globalization process itself.

Thirdly, as the conception of globalization as Americanization has been revised, a new conception of globalization or the concept of “glocalization” is taking shape. This concept is coupled with the above mentioned insight that globalization coexists with religion and ethnicity. As Schuerkens (2004: 11) says, “it is the image of a global world linked to local life-worlds all over the world.” Instead of viewing the globalized world in terms of centre and periphery, glocalization views it as an adequate combination of homogenization and diversity, or a global network of market economy with diverse global cultures. We cannot yet say that glocalization is a real-ity. But neither is it ideology or fairy tale. We are in the middle of various forces working for and against glocalization. Thus, glocalization is a policy objective to realize “the globalization with homogenization and diversity” (Schuerkens 2004: 11) in a long-term perspective.

Fourthly, glocalization as a policy objective will be more adequately re-defined as globalization with good governance. It is not a simple combina-tion of a global market and local life-worlds. It does not simply permit the persistence of local traditions, but rather promotes reinvention of local tra-ditions. Thus, it internalizes social transformation and change of local life-worlds. At the same time, glocalization is also concerned with the rapidity and extent of expansion of global markets. People living in a local life-

Globalization and good governance 3

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world tend to desire stability and continuity. Hasty and excessive expansion of global markets has produced fears of globalization as well as a sense of loss of familiar ways. This is the reason why anti-global movements are growing. In order to avoid this kind of fruitless contestation, we need to change our views on globalization and to redefine it as glocalization or globalization with good governance. According to this new definition, globalization is the global market with transformative and protective mechanisms for local life-worlds.

1.2. Defining “good governance”

Munshi (2004: 51f.), defines good governance as follows: “Good govern-ance signifies a participative manner of governing that functions in a re-sponsible, accountable and transparent manner based on the principles of efficiency, legitimacy and consensus for the purpose of promoting the rights of individual citizens and the public interest, thus indicating the exer-cise of political will for ensuring the material welfare of society and sus-tainable development with social justice.” Elsewhere, Liberatore (2004: 74), referring to the White Paper of the European Commission 2001, identifies principles of good governance as openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence. These principles are supposed to work to-gether with two others, the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. The principle of subsidiarity, according to de Swaan (2004: 57), is the prin-ciple that leaves to the member states those religious and cultural matters that need not be regulated at the Union level because they do not affect the free movement of persons, services, goods and capital. The principle of proportionality dictates that the measures taken should be proportionate to the problem tackled.

Although these arguments are about good governance in the European Union, the same arguments hold in the case of globalization in general. Thus, the principles of good governance in globalization are the principles of openness, participation, accountability and efficiency, together with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. Among these, the principles of openness, participation and accountability express the democratic aspect of good governance. The principle of efficiency is the expression of the economic aspect of good governance. Principles of subsidiarity and propor-tionality would pursue an adequate relationship between global markets, national governments and local life-worlds.

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Considering that each of these principles expresses different values of good governance in globalization, we should keep in mind that we need to make substantial value judgments or strike a balance between basic values when we apply these principles in actual situations. Enumerating the prin-ciples is not enough. We have to choose or at least give priority to one principle rather than another by making value judgments. For example, we sometimes confront the situation where we have to decide whether priority should be given to the economic principle of efficiency or to the democratic principles of participation and accountability, while balancing basic values of economic growth and cultural diversity. Putting more weight on “eco-nomic growth” is to choose the principle of efficiency, while emphasizing democratic principles means making “cultural diversity” more important. As to the principle of subsidiarity, the problem of how far this principle should be applied often depends upon our balancing basic values between “rule of law” and “tradition”. Putting more weight on the value of “rule of law” means restricting the applicability of subsidiarity, while emphasizing the value of local tradition and history is to widen its applicability. These examples show that by giving priority to one particular principle we are in fact deeply committed to the acts of balancing basic values.

So far, we have been considering the concept of goodness in “globaliza-tion with good governance”. Now, the concept of good governance is com-posed of goodness and governance. But what does governance mean? It is often said that governance is different from government. Certainly, it is not the same as national government. It includes political and social activities outside the national government, such as various activities by NPOs, NGOs and sometimes multi-national corporations. But doesn’t the concept of gov-ernance also contain the activities of the national government? I think it does, although some people argue against this tenet. We need national gov-ernmental activities in order to make “good governance in globalization” feasible. We all know that many national governments have been hindering the process of globalization, either by their protectionism and closing do-mestic markets for vested interests or by exploiting their people with greedy capitalism in the name of “deregulation and small government”. Therefore, what we need is a new conception of governmental activities to promote “good governance in globalization”. We do not need conventional or traditional national government. We need a changed role of government, but it should not be confused with a reduced role or the idea of small gov-ernment.


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In this context, Munshi (2004: 48) refers to “government with govern-ance”. “Government with governance should suggest that governance is a broader concept and also that it is a concept that sets the normative basis of government.” Thus, the same principles that we have just argued about good governance in globalization are also applied in considering a changed role of national government. These are the principles of openness, partici-pation, accountability and efficiency, together with the principles of sub-sidiarity and proportionality. Also, we have to commit ourselves to balanc-ing these principles in policy practices of national governments.

1.3. The “third ways” of government

Discussions about the role of government usually favour either a welfare state or libertarian “small government”. However, none of the arguments above recommend either of these ideas. Rather, they suggest a third way somewhere in between. The so-called “Third Way in Europe” is a concept made familiar by the British government of Tony Blair and the German government of Gerhard Schröder, but with different points of emphasis. The plural expression “third ways” is therefore more accurate: it means diverse policy practices with a balancing and contextual approach within the principles of good governance. Martell (2004: 96) specifies characteris-tics of the third ways. They are (1) government working in partnership with the private and voluntary sectors; (2) government acting as a guarantor but not a direct provider of public goods; (3) government departments working together across departmental boundaries; (4) the welfare state helping indi-viduals off social security and into work; (5) government providing indi-viduals such public services as childcare, education and training to improve their opportunities and to encourage their responsibilities. Relating these characteristics to the principles of glocalization or globalization with good governance, (1) corresponds to the principles of openness and accountabil-ity, (2) and (3) roughly correspond to the principles of efficiency, subsidiar-ity and proportionality, (4) and (5) comply with the principle of participa-tion. Thus in order to realize glocalization as a policy objective, national governments should act in the third ways, that is, as governments with good governance.

As Martell (2004: 107) says, “Third Ways between neo-liberalism and old-style social democracy are different Third Ways rather than just one. The Third Way is diverse and contested.” For example, compared with

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Blair’s Third Way of apparent neo-liberal direction, the Third Way in Ger-many seems to be more allied with the tradition of social democracy. Schmidt (2004: 356) describes Germany’s Third Way as “a process of in-ternationalization and liberalization tempered by the strong German par-ticipatory tradition.” It has a neo-liberal orientation with a touch of Rhenish capitalism, where economic and political culture is more collaborative and corporatist, unions are more important, finance is less market-based and longer term, and work is more skilled, secure and better paid – more of a “social market” (Martell 2004: 104).

Compared with the Third Ways in Europe, what can we say about the Japanese government? Can we define a Third Way in Japan? After five years of political reform by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, we cannot yet say that Japan now has a definite idea of its own Third Way. However, it seems to me that the Japanese people are gradually finding the way to-wards a new role of government in the age of globalization with good gov-ernance. It is the image of a small but strong government, working between economic liberalization and vitalization of communities with the spirit of syncretism. When it becomes evident, it might be called Japan’s Third Way, but it is not a variant of European Third Ways, although it has certain commonalities with them, in as much as both are assuming economic liber-alization and democracy. But Japan’s Third Way is different from Euro-pean Third Ways in that Europe is rooted in the civil society of ancient Greek-Roman origins and Christian tradition, whereas Japan has the as-sumption of nationally integrated communities with religious and cultural syncretism. In this respect, Spohn (2004: 82) made some remarks on relig-ion and nationalism in East Asia. The region is characterized by three major religious traditions: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. As an Asian nation, Japan’s identity would be defined by a syncretistic combination of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism with its own Shintoism.

My argument here is not about religious difference between Europe and East Asia. My point is that Japanese tradition is characterized by its syncre-tism, compared with the European dualism of Greek-Roman civil society and Christianity. So, when we consider Japan’s Third Way, we have to take this syncretism into account. For example, as mentioned earlier, the Third Ways mean globalization with good governance and the idea of good gov-ernance contains democracy and global markets. In the European case, this is the idea of social democracy and a social market. I suspect that the Euro-pean notion will not directly apply to the Japanese case. Rather, Japanese


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good governance means syncretistic democracy and a market characterized by the attitude of consensus and toleration.

Thus, we have two types of Third Ways or globalization with good gov-ernance. One is European Third Ways combining market economy with social democracy. The other is a Japanese (or, I would say, Asian) Third Way, that is, the attempt to reconcile market economy and syncretistic de-mocracy. Between these two types, there is no disagreement about what the principles of good governance are. However, there does seem to be some lack of agreement about the modality or modal attitude of balancing and weighing basic values and principles, due to the difference between dual-ism and syncretism.

2. Language policy

2.1. Two aspects of language

It is often said that every language has two different functions: the commu-nicative function and the symbolic or identity function. On the one hand, language is the outstanding means by which human beings communicate with each other. Considering human diversity of race, ethnicity and culture, it is only through language that we can prevent all kinds of conflict arising from these differences and make interrelation and peace possible. On the other hand, language has been seen as the essential part of each ethnicity and culture. In this sense, human beings frame their personal identity through their own language, as they shape their personality by their own ethnicity and culture. As Wright (2004: 245), citing Ernest Gellner, indi-cates, these two functions have their origins in human needs for identity, stability and belonging in one’s community, and at the same time, human ambitions to transcend one’s community.

These two functions have usually been interpreted as opposing each other, producing two different philosophical schools, atomistic individual-ism on the one hand, and romantic organism on the other. Moreover, as globalization advances it produces anti-global movements of regionalism, that is, the renaissance of local political organizations together with the renaissance of minority languages. And there is a strong argument that the renaissance of minority languages is a negative reaction against the exces-sive proliferation of international communications, which reflects a nega-

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tive attitude towards globalization as a force destructive of regional com-munities.

In spite of the prevailing dichotomies of atomic individualism vs roman-tic organism, as well as of global communication vs regional minority lan-guages, as we have just argued for glocalization and Third Ways with re-gard to globalization in general, I argue for glocalization and Third Ways for a language policy that reconciles global communication with the renais-sance of regional languages. In this respect, Wright (2004: 246) raises the key question of “whether the phenomena of a spreading lingua franca and global networks can be reconciled to a growing desire to conserve commu-nity and traditional ways of meaning, or whether they are competing phe-nomena that cannot easily coexist.”

It is obvious that Wright’s arguments are inspired by the philosophy of Ernest Gellner, in particular the arguments in his book Language and Soli-tude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma. After consid-ering such philosophical contestations as atomism vs organism, universal-ism vs particularism, individualism vs collectivism, as well as a sociologi-cal contrast of society (Gesellschaft) with community (Gemeinschaft), Gellner seeks to find a way to overcome these contrasts. Lukes (1998: xiv), in his Foreword to Gellner’s book, describes it as a third option. It is to combine “the recognition that shared culture can alone endow life with order and meaning with understanding that the notion of a culture-transcending truth is inseparable from cognitive (notably scientific) and economic growth, that it is central to our culture and indeed that the possi-bility of transcendence of cultural limits constitutes the most important single fact about human life.” If we replace the word “culture” with “lan-guage”, we clearly see the connection between Gellner’s philosophical thought and our arguments for two functions of language. Thus, Gellner’s third option can be understood as Third Ways language policy or glocaliza-tion of language, which combines the recognition that shared languagealone can endow life with order and meaning with understanding that the notion of a language-transcending truth is inseparable from cognitive (no-tably scientific) and economic growth, that it is central to our language and indeed that the possibility of transcendence of linguistic limits constitutes the most important single fact about human life.


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2.2. A new concept of bilingualism

Let us now return to Wright’s question of whether the worldwide spread of a lingua franca can be reconciled with local community and traditional ways of meaning. In answering the question, she proposes a new concept of bilingualism. Let me summarize her arguments. So far, the implicit as-sumption about bilingualism was that it combines national language and mother tongues. Alternatively, bilingualism can also be conceived as com-bining the global lingua franca and mother tongues. According to Wright, English as a lingua franca is entirely a language of international communi-cation and thus has no aspect of language of identity. In contrast, national language is not only a language of communication, but also a language of identity. It always contains implications of nationalism and forces the peo-ple to adjust to its national values and morality. Therefore, as Wright says, “bilingualism in nationalism was rarely stable. Since national language was intertwined with patriotism, nation builders were always likely to press minorities to take the further step from second language acquisition and bilingualism to full-scale shift” (Wright 2004: 247). Moreover, mother tongue maintenance in bilingualism of this sort produces among the major-ity a suspicion towards linguistic minorities and their inadequate loyalty to the nation. Bilingualism of English and mother tongues is free from these tendencies. Because of its exclusively communicative character, English as a lingua franca does not clash with a minority language, even if the latter exercises the identity function and fosters its culture and morality.

Arguably, then, glocalization and Third Ways for language is what Wright’s bilingualism of English as a lingua franca and regional languages amounts to. As she maintains, this kind of bilingualism may not only ease the tension between communicative and identity functions of language, but also promote or strengthen these two functions by spreading globalized English as well as flourishing regional languages. The question is whether this kind of bilingualism is feasible at the present time. Wright acknowl-edges this, although she insists that more and more linguistic minorities are becoming bilingual at the international level, while more national majori-ties are becoming bilingual, implying that national languages will become regional languages in the future. At the same time she admits that “this is all, of course, highly speculative. Such a globalized future, where identity is served by membership of small language groups and communication is catered for as an ever-larger percentage of populations learn the current

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lingua franca presupposes a withering (weakening) of the state in its present form, and the process could still move into reverse” (Wright 2004: 249).

As she suspects, the reality is that the process is now moving into re-verse and state power is strengthening, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 2001 in the United States. So we are now watching three different tendencies, the spread of English as a lingua franca, the growth of nationalism and the revival of regional languages, coexisting and each heading in separate directions. Faced with this odd situation, Wright even-tually proposes the need for more targeted investigation of how the three levels (global/national/local) are developing and interacting linguistically, as well as the reconceptualization of the nationalist paradigm (Wright 2004: 251).

2.3. A third-ways language policy

So far, we have argued for linguistic glocalization through considering two functions of language as well as three levels of language development (global/national/local). Wright proposes a new bilingualism of English as a lingua franca plus regional languages and the reformulation of nationalism. As for the feasibility of the former, I am sceptical but I agree with the latter. In the next section, I argue for linguistic glocalization and a third-ways language policy in the context of Japan. For now, in order to prepare my argument, I indicate several points concerning language, language rights and language policy.

First of all, the communication and identity functions are operative on three levels: global, national and local. Local languages have both commu-nicative and identity functions, so do national languages and the global language. The difference is the degree of emphasis upon communication or identity, from local language with more emphasis upon identity to global language with more emphasis upon communication. This means that the national and even the global language have some sort of identity function, and we have to take this element into account when we consider linguistic glocalization and third ways for language policy.

Secondly, let us consider the concept of language rights. It is usually thought that language rights are closely related to the identity function of language. As pointed out above, language has both communicative and identity functions at each of the three levels. Thus, if we conceptualize language rights as autonomous and independent from policy considerations,


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we cannot avoid the conclusion that along with local languages, both na-tional languages and the global language could assert language rights as well. In order to avoid this strange conclusion, we need to reconsider lan-guage rights within the framework of language policy. Thus, in the frame-work of linguistic glocalization, language rights would be defined within language policy. This means two things. One is that language rights will mainly be asserted for local languages to compete with, not to protect against, national languages and the global language, but to a lesser degree, also for national languages to compete with the global language. This im-plies that in the future, when more and more people are substantially living in a global village with a global language, for their global identity, they will need, as it were, “global language rights” in order to compete with local and national languages. The other thing is that, as the plurality of third ways suggests, the concept of language rights is defined contextually, re-flecting various factors of each society, such as the vitality of local lan-guages, the strength of the national language, and the involvement in the global economy.

Thirdly, as to language policy, it cannot be realized by unilateral acts of political power, for instance, by a national government. Even regarding nationalism and nation-building, if language policy is to be successful, it needs both a top-down process of political power and a bottom-up move-ment by the people. In the case of linguistic glocalization and the third-way language policy, the concurrence of top-down process and bottom-up movement is all the more necessary. Any language policy can be defined as restricting the citizens’ linguistic activities, be it efforts to improve compe-tence in English as the lingua franca, or grass-roots attempts to protect the national language, or spontaneous activities to revive regional languages. Thus, in order to achieve an adequate third-way language policy, we need a delicate and balanced approach to evaluate these various movements as impartially as possible.

3. Third-way language policy in future Japan

3.1. Problems with kokugo or “national (identity) language”

The overall impression is that Japanese awareness of language policy is either nationalistic or anti-nationalistic, while the awareness of a third-way language policy is still imperceptible or low-profile. National language

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awareness exercises a strong influence occupying the Japanese mind when-ever language policy is debated, even among intellectuals and bureaucrats. The symbol of this national language awareness is the term kokugo or “na-tional (identity) language”.

Thus, before discussing the possibility of a Japanese third-way language policy, I want to consider this terminology. It has been used in official pa-pers on Japanese language policy to refer to the Japanese language. As there has been a growing concern about Japanese national language policy, two official papers on the subject have been published in recent years. One is “the official report of the National Language Deliberative Council of Japan” (Kokugoshingikai H kokusho 22) of December 2000, and the other is the “official report of the national language section of the Agency of Cultural Affairs” (Bunkashingikai Kokugobunkakai T shin) of January 2004. The term kokugo or “national (identity) language” is used in both of these two official reports.

The problem is that in these reports the term kokugo signifies both the identity and communicative functions of Japanese. This is confusing be-cause we need to distinguish language activities at the three levels men-tioned above, that is, global/national/local, and to evaluate Japanese aware-ness of each of them. In some cases, the term kokugo seems to signify the Japanese language in a global age, and in other cases it includes regional dialects and languages, in spite of the fact that its principal meanings are both Standard Japanese and, especially, the national language that symbol-izes Japanese nationalism.

In the past, efforts have been made to avoid these confusions. Proceed-ings of the first report of 2000 show that there was substantial discussion on whether the term kokugo “national language” is appropriate, or whether the term nihongo “Japanese” might be more appropriate to express official statements of Japanese language policy (Bunkach 2000: 147–157). Both the reports of 2000 and 2004 eventually adopted the term kokugo. Official statements tend to use the term kokugo to express both the identity and communicative functions of the Japanese language. This tendency seems to become stronger. This is testified by the fact that the main title of the offi-cial report of 2004, “On national (identity) language ability for the coming age” (korekara no jidai ni motomerareru kokugoryoku ni tsuite), uses the more impressive expression kokugoryoku or “national (identity) language ability” instead of kokugo or “national (identity) language”. The title of the official report of 2000 was simply “On national (identity) language policy


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in coping with the new age” (atarashii jidai ni oujita kokugo seisaku no arikata ni tsuite).

As a comprehensive term for formulating a Japanese language policyJapanese or nihongo would be more appropriate than “national (identity) language” or kokugo. In fact, if we replace kokugo with nihongo in the two official reports mentioned above, a more definite and consistent image of the language policy in these reports transpires. Take, for example, the main title of the 2004 report. If we adopt the expression “On Japanese language ability for the coming age” (korekara no jidai ni motomerareru ni-hongoryoku ni tsuite), instead of “On national (identity) language ability for the coming age” (korekara no jidai ni motomerareru kokugoryoku ni tsuite), or, about the report 2000, “On Japanese language policy in coping with the new age” (atarashii jidai ni oujita nihongo seisaku no arikata ni tsuite), instead of “On national (identity) language policy in coping with the new age” (atarashii jidai ni oujita kokugo seisaku no arikata ni tsuite), we can get a clearer and more consistent image of Japanese language policy. The same holds, not just for the titles, but for the entire texts of these re-ports.

In the context of Japanese language policy the term kokugo has four meanings: kokugo as national (identity) language, kokugo as standard lan-guage (hy jungo), kokugo as common language (ky ts go), and kokugo as dialects (h gen). However, because of its nationalistic connotation, the term contradicts its third and fourth meanings. On the other hand, if the term nihongo is used, it also has four meanings: nihongo as national (iden-tity) language, nihongo as standard language (hy jungo), nihongo as com-mon language (ky ts go), and nihongo as dialects (h gen). Yet in this case, because of its neutral character, it sounds quite natural in every usage.

3.2. Tentative proposals

What would be a third-way language policy in future Japan? I have just pointed out that the term nihongo is preferable to kokugo in the context of Japanese language policy. It is not simply a matter of wording. It also has several political and social implications for a Japanese third way.

First of all, phrases such as kokugo seisaku or “national (identity) lan-guage policy” and kokugoryoku or “national (identity) language ability” would be replaced by nihongo seisaku “Japanese language policy” and nihongoryoku “Japanese language ability”. This will be an improvement

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because the term kokugo contains contradictory elements. On one hand, it is used as the general term for the Japanese language and therefore relates to both identity and communicative aspects of Japanese language policy. On the other hand, it has strong connotations of national identity and it tends to get in the way not just of practical communication, but also of local identi-ties by minority and dialect communities. Thus, if we design a Japanese third-way language policy in the age of globalization (glocalization) and at the same time use kokugo as the general term for Japanese, this will result in confusion on the part of the Japanese people. Under such circumstances, clear statements of policy objectives and policy tools will become ex-tremely difficult and objective assessments of the policy and its effective-ness will be utterly impossible. Therefore, in order to accomplish account-ability and effectiveness of policy performance as well as to avoid contra-dictory policy practices, we should replace kokugo seisaku “national iden-tity language policy” and kokugoryoku “national identity language ability” by nihongo seisaku “Japanese language policy” and nihongoryoku “Japa-nese language ability”.

Secondly, the replacement of kokugo by nihongo does not imply the ex-clusion of kokugo from Japanese language policy. On the contrary, kokugowill adequately refer to the identity aspect of Japanese language policy. There is severe criticism that linking kokugo with the identity function of the Japanese language is reminiscent of the nationalistic language policy of prewar Japan. To offset this criticism, kokugo would have to widen its meaning to signify both national identity and local identities of Japanese language and culture. In fact, it seems to me that kokugo actually has this wider meaning in the official papers. For example, the official report of 2004 contains the following description. “National (identity) language is the basis of the culture of our country, which has been formed in our long history.” (Kokugo wa nagai rekisi no nakade keisei saretekita wagakuni no bunka no kiban o nasu) (Bunkach 2004). In this statement, if “national (identity) language” or kokugo signifies solely Japanese language generated and formulated by the nationalistic language policy since the Meiji period, this statement is clearly at variance with Japanese history. Japan has a much longer history and cultural heritage pre-dating the Meiji era. On the other hand, if “national (identity) language” or kokugo contains both national identity and local identities of the Japanese language, the statement is quite true in accordance with Japanese history.

Thus, for a Japanese third-way language policy, the definition of kokugoshould be transformed to signify both national identity and local identities


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of Japanese language and culture, and therefore kokugo seisaku or “national (identity) language policy” should also contain both “national language policy” kokugo seisaku and the “policy of regional languages or dialects” hogen seisaku.

Thirdly, while kokugo with wider meanings should relate to the identity aspect of the Japanese language, hy jungo or “standard language” should relate to the communicative aspect. However, within the present policy framework, hy jungo is almost synonymous with kokugo, relating to both identity and communicative aspects of Japanese. Hy jungo corresponds not just to the communicative function, it also evokes the identity function. This is because the idea of a “standard” hy jun suggests a check on “lan-guage disorder” kotoba no midare, and the idea of language disorder im-plies both inadequacy of language usage in pragmatic terms and moral im-propriety against Japanese national identity.

In coping with the present situation, a third-way language policy would propose that hy jungo and kokugo should be separated in their usages. Hy -jungo should refer to the communicative function of the Japanese standard language alone. Thus, hy jungo or “standard language” should not dis-criminate against h gen or “regional languages” in terms of its connotation of exclusive nationalism. Rather, it should be differentiated from ky ts goor “common language” in terms of its sophisticated level of communication.

3.3. Final remarks

Would these proposals lead to a Japanese third-way language policy? I think they would. As I pointed out earlier, globalization has gradually been reconceptualized as glocalization, which is the global economy with trans-formative and protective mechanisms for local life-worlds. Acknowledging this reality, the Japanese government is moving towards a third way in its economic and political reform. It is the image of a small but strong gov-ernment working for economic liberalization and the vitalization of com-munities.

When we apply this image to language policy, the redefinition of ko-kugo and hy jungo will promote vitalization of communities and economic liberalization. As to kokugo, seeing that the term exerts strong influence in Japanese society, we should respect its use, but only for identity function in a wider sense. Thus kokugo would be redefined as language of identity, meaning not only “national language” but also “regional languages”. And

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this definition would be in keeping with the spirit of syncretism of Japanese society and the strengthening of nationally integrated communities.

As to hy jungo or “standard language”, it would denote a sophisticated language of communication with both rule-governed expressions or keii hy gen and sympathetic, non-verbal ways of communication or sasshi. It is compared with ky ts go or “common language”, which will be more prag-matic and widely used by foreigners as well as Japanese. With hy jungoand ky ts go, Japanese will be a language of communication with effi-ciency and diversity, which will be germane to globalization or economic liberalization.

In closing my arguments, I have to ask whether my proposals or the ini-tiative for Japan’s third way would be feasible. Seeing that Japanese sub-conscious attitudes about language are still divided between nationalistic and anti-nationalistic, and that the awareness of language policy among Japanese people is low, we have to admit that it will take some time before these proposals will be accepted. However, as Japan’s third way is steadily advancing in economic and political reform, Japanese language policy will also be reinvented in the near future.

References

Bunkach (Agency for Cultural Studies) 2000 Kokugoshingikai Hohkokusho 22 [Report of the National Language

Council]. Tokyo: Bunkach . 2004 Korekara no jidai ni motomerareru Kokugoryoku nit tsuite [Re-

quirements on Japanese language proficiency for the coming age]. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/bunka/toushin/04020301.htm

de Swaan, Abram 2004 Policy without Politics: Social, Cultural and Linguistic Affairs in the

European Union. In Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization, Surendra Munshi and Biju P. Abraham (eds.), 54–69. London: Sage Publications.

Liberatore, Angela 2004 Governance and Democracy: Reflections on the European Debate. In

Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization, Suren-dra Munshi and Biju P. Abraham (eds.), 70–91. London: Sage Publi-cations.


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Lukes, Steven 1998 Foreword. In Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and

the Habsburg Dilemma, Ernest Gellner, xiii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martell, Luke 2004 National Differences and the Rethinking of Social Democracy: Third

Ways in Europe. In Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization, Surendra Munshi and Biju P. Abraham (eds.), 92–109. London: Sage Publications.

Munshi, Surendra 2004 Concern for Good Governance in Comparative Perspective. In Good

Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization, Surendra Munshi and Biju P. Abraham (eds.), 33–53. London: Sage Publica-tions.

Schmidt, Rudi 2004 Convergence of Divergences: The Changing Legal Frameworks,

Free Market Ideology and Corporate Reorganization in German En-terprises. In Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globaliza-tion, Surendra Munshi and Biju P. Abraham (eds.), 343–359. Lon-don: Sage Publications.

Schuerkens, Ulrike 2004 Social Transformations Between Global Forces and Local Life-

Worlds: Introduction. In Global Forces and Local Life-Worlds, Ul-rike Schuerkens (ed.), 1–13. London: Sage Publications.

Spohn, Willfried 2004 Multiple Modernity, Nationalism and Religion: A Global Perspective.

In Global Forces and Local Life-Worlds, Ulrike Schuerkens (ed.), 67–87. London: Sage Publications.

Wright, Sue 2004 Language Policy and Language Planning, from Nationalism to Glo-

balization. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thrifty monolingualism and luxuriating plurilingualism?

Konrad Ehlich

1. The world of languages

The world is multilingual. Approximately 5.000 to 6.000 languages are currently spoken, and a – far smaller – number of them are also written. Linguistic ability characterises the human species, and is, thus, an anthropo-logical marker for this species. Other species use other modes of communi-cation, and even the human species does not limit its communication to language alone. Other, perhaps older, communicative systems coexist with the linguistic; for example, the system of cries or – though it has receded and is often culturally and artificially overlain – olfactory communication. The various animal species have developed other means of communication based on the differing aspects of sensory perception available to them. In-asmuch as these methods of communication are of anthropological rele-vance, they have either receded into the background with respect to that characteristic that marks our species, namely language, or they have been partly integrated or partly transformed in and by language.

Yet the linguistic ability that distinguishes humankind is an abstraction. It only takes shape in the reality of each individual language, among those 5.000 to 6.000 currently known present and past languages (for example, the Accadian, the Ugaritic, or the Hittite), and even among those that have vanished in the mists of history without leaving even a trace behind.

The world’s languages are thus the specific form the abstract species characteristic "linguistic ability" manifests itself in. They constitute the world of language(s) and mark it as something that already has, in an an-thropological sense, diversification as one of its characteristic determinants. In this, the world of languages differs from other more tangible species characteristics such as the physical endowments of humankind or of each individual person.

This has been objected to and has repeatedly prompted speculative in-terpretations, two forms of which I shall address. One is a mythic retro-grade projection in which there is no place for diversification. Here every-thing that belonged to the individual and his or her social association also belonged to the species. The “humankind” of this projection, of course,

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spoke only one language. In other words, in this mythic projection into the past, linguistic ability and language – the abstract characteristic of the spe-cies and the concrete form it takes in an individual language – are melted into one. In this way, it was possible to narratively overcome the cognitive nuisance of plurilingualism. By associating humankind with one language, this nuisance was done away with, sublated, so to speak, in the concept of the species.

This construct is most clearly articulated in biblical ur-history. The spe-cific language in which it was formulated, Hebrew, had two parallel pre-conditions. The term used for humans was already a term for the species: adam did not designate an individual human (as was thereafter repeatedly suggested in both exegesis and iconography), but rather the species. In ad-dition, the major designations for language were two metonyms, safa,meaning the lips (as in Gen. 11, v. 1, i.e. in the above mentioned story of prehistoric monolingualism) and lashon, the tongue. The conceptual move evident in these metonymic designations bases language on the physiologi-cal endowments of the species by using the tools common to all humans to name the abstraction, language (per se), as well as to name each individual, specific language. The starting point for this view of language thus lies in physiology, and it is well suited to bridge the gap between linguistic ability and language. Humankind, or each human, has his/her “lip”, his/her lan-guage.

The second conjecture comes from the present, and is based on one of the most noted and probably most widespread linguistic concepts, namely the so-called universal grammatical paradigm that is associated with Noam Chomsky. In this paradigm, universal language ability is hypostatised, ini-tially as a theoretical construct, but then increasingly in terms of its biologi-cal and neurological manifestations. This ability is then assumed to be a universal characteristic of the species, and it is assumed to grow as part of a natural developmental process. It provides the child with language that as a matter of principle already exceeds any imitable input, language (the “i-language”) that transcends all concrete speech and all concrete linguistic analysis. It is, so to speak, a universal (which means species-specific), ab-stract linguistic ability that is part of the neuronal “hardware”. This abstract linguistic ability is conceived of as a sentence-generating mechanism whose output (the “e-language”) consists of perceivable utterances – the concrete manifestation of language. Initially, the transformation process of the abstraction of linguistic ability into the specific sentences of an actual language was – as it were, naturally – tied to English, the lingua franca of

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the research community in which this construct was developed. This is how the difference between the abstract and the concrete was almost “naturally” overcome, following a tradition about which more will be noted (see sec. 7 below).

Later, the increasing confrontation with other language systems called for burdensome auxiliary constructs. The metaphor of parametricization was used to theoretically rein in the differences encountered within a multi-lingual world of languages. The concrete, albeit a nuisance, demanded at-tention.

In order to do justice to human linguistic ability, it will be necessary to address the dialectics of the abstraction called “language” and the concrete manifestations called “languages”, though in a way different from the two speculations above.

2. Language reduction

The world of languages has remained untouched by these theoretical, speculative matters. It is in the individual languages themselves in which linguistic ability can be perceived and analysed. The challenges the world’s plurilingualism presents move along a different dimension, namely one that results from the actual development of this plurilingualism. This develop-ment is currently almost dramatic. Even if one is not a fan of catastrophic scenarios, a sober view of the development of languages in the world shows that the diversity of languages is being reduced at a breathtaking pace. Many languages are literally dying out, in the sense that their last speakers are dying, as is the case for various Australian as well as Central and South American languages. The linguists’ work here, much like that of the eth-nologists’, can ironically be called pre-archaeological. Whole research pro-grammes are devoted to the attempt to at least permit a scientific descrip-tion before knowledge of these languages irrevocably vanishes with the last speaker. This, of course, contributes nothing to their preservation.

The Linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas – drawing a not unproblematic parallel to the extinction of biological species – has made projections into the near future regarding language diversity. According to these projections, the pessimistic estimate is that within a century, 90% of the languages now in existence will have vanished or be close to extinction. If one takes a more realistic-optimistic view, the estimate is 50% (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Society for Endangered Languages at www.uni-koeln.de/gbs/).

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Whatever form the future development will actually take, it is clear there will be a drastic reduction in the number of languages. This is due to a global development that began at the latest with the European colonization of the globe. It is not as though such developments did not take place ear-lier, for early history (and prehistory) were characterised by massive popu-lation migrations. In their wake, languages encountered one another, and language replacement, language mixture and language succession took place. The manifold possibilities inherent in such contacts thus belong to the world of languages. The history of language, in other words, is a historyof languages, and permits both a typology and a systematisation of such possibilities.

What is currently new in this development, however, is something else: the global quality such processes have taken since the time of colonization. Among other things, Europeanisation of the world resulted in a new struc-ture of the relationships between languages. The vortex of the political and economic configurations that change languages has drawn in all groupings regardless of their socio-political constitution – and will continue to do so.

3. Individualisation and plurilingualism

With this, a self-sufficient world with its specific linguistic imprint, ends. What did this world look like? In it, plurilingualism was something abstract, a characteristic perceivable only in an overview of the whole. For specific groups or even individual speakers, this abstraction was reduced to a lim-ited number of specific languages and language contacts. Aside from boundary-crossers such as traders, linguistic ability remained limited to one’s own specific language. That found its limits at the borders to imme-diate neighbouring groups, such borders being at the same time the locus of contact between individual languages. Some societies maintained several such languages, for example one for men and one for women, though these were the exceptions. Generally, language was a central means of fostering identity for the group as a whole. Contact with other groups and their lan-guages multiplied this experience. Such contacts led, particularly following the model of exogamy, to the acquisition of a variety of languages. How-ever, the associated challenges remained quite limited.

Thus, in cases where a systematic, communicative interaction demanded it, a general, abstract plurilingualism became a specific, individual capacity. This plurilingualism was quite functional. The memo-technical challenges


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were upheld by the motivations resulting from the reasons for interacting, and were apparently readily mastered. Thus, a plurilingualism that was constituted in a constellation of linguistic group contact became an individ-ual linguistic reality.

4. Loss of range

The early modern development of languages, is characterised by a dual, contradictory development. On the one hand, a few languages possessing maximal communicative range are being starkly limited in their functions, and on the other hand, there is a permanent broadening of the communica-tive range of other languages. The first of these developments primarily affected the two central languages of knowledge: Byzantine Greek in the East, and Latin in the West, the language of church and administration. In the East, the Greek world shrank sharply until its territory was limited to the City of Constantinople and its environs, which in 1453 experienced its final, complete takeover by Ottoman Islam. This prompted a massive emi-gration of the intelligentsia to the West, particularly to Rome, a develop-ment with momentous linguistic consequences.

The dissolution of the importance of Latin was due primarily to changes in the economic structure not only in its core areas in northern Italy, but also on its northern periphery, the Hanseatic League. The coming of the Reformation – as well as what was later seen as a precursor, namely the vulgarisation of the religious traditions in both England and the Czech lands – then sealed Latin’s linguistic fate.

5. Colonization and post-colonialism

The expansion of languages, on the other hand, has been affected particu-larly by the varied history of colonization. Generally, the large colonial empires brought about a linguistic, though more importantly, an economic homogenisation patterned by the respective colonial power. The economy of the colonised region adapted to the structures of the hegemon, and so did the language. The hegemon’s language also became the means of inter-course between colonial masters and subjects – as well as an attractive goal of language acquisition for those intermediaries who wished to participate in colonial power. This took thoroughly different forms – from creolised languages (for English, see Sauer 2004) through language supremacy to a

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complete abandonment of the colonised language by relevant segments of the group of speakers (Ehlich 1994).

Perhaps one of the most important effects of the Second World War, which marked the end of the colonial paradigm, was to leave behind a world of languages in which, on the one hand, the former colonial lan-guages, and, on the other hand, the languages of several decolonised (or formerly colonization threatened) areas, dominate the world.

The ten languages most-spoken in the world today have all directly been engaged in these processes. On the one side, one finds the colonial lan-guages of English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and French. On the other side, one finds the “decolonization languages” of Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, and Indonesian. Arabic has taken on a dual role, as a coloniser’s language in the early modern era, and partly as a decolonization language of the 20th century. Each of these languages today has more than 100 million speakers. Japanese, German and Italian are the languages of social groups that tried to participate in the colonialist enterprise in the first half of the 20th century – only to then fail in a grand manner, with catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world and for themselves. (Other, smaller territorial and im-perial regions and social groups, such as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, or Holland and Belgium, belong also in this context, though in each case their political and linguistic effects were different.)

6. Internal expansion of range

A precondition for the expansion of the range of these languages was inter-nal expansion. The creation of a comparatively homogenous language zone was driven by military, political and religious forces. This movement found its definite conceptualisation in the idea of the “nation” as it was developed in Europe, and was implemented accordingly. Thus, language took on an importance that went far beyond its direct, teleological functionality for economic intercourse. The vacuum that resulted from removing dynastic forms of government legitimised by divine right called for varied substitu-tions. In this context, language took on a central role, becoming a means of engendering identity in a situation where identity was in question. The communitarian function of the medium of language took on a new form to meet the needs of larger, and necessarily more abstract, societal forms.


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7. Structural changes

It is the economic structures which have shown themselves to be both cause and consequence of the largest structural changes.

Since the time barter has existed, it has tended to cross group boundaries. This crossing makes it particularly interesting. To undertake barter, new communicative procedures are needed that transcend the means of commu-nication available to the participant groups. Firstly, these procedures arise in the course of the development of specialised trade-related languages, among which the linguistically most prominent are the pidgins. Secondly, they emerge by designating one language (that carries limited linguistic functionality) as the basis for a language of commercial intercourse: a lin-gua franca. Thirdly, these new communicative procedures are achieved by the plurilingual individuals engaged in these transactions. This form of plurilingualism has consistently been an integral part of modern develop-ments, in and by which the world as a market and the world market as the goal of all economic exchange are made real.

However, this is only one aspect of the new, global economy. It is pre-cisely the transformation of colonialism into post-(or neo-)colonialism that has lain the foundation for new economic, political, and linguistic struc-tures. These structures give the crassness of capitalistic transformation an additional, unique dynamic. The imposition of a general form of economic structures, a form that is based on "free trade" (between three different parts, the so-called developed world, the threshold countries, and the so-called Third World) constitutes the world market as a generalized one, and espe-cially as a locus not just for goods but increasingly also for the commodity labour. The growing gap between finance capital and productive capital, the divergence between cheap and expensive wage labour, and the large-scale volatility of capital as well as of production, is revolutionizing the conditions of production more and more quickly.

Thus, an antagonism arises between the living conditions of societal groups and a structural change that is perceived as all-powerful and taking place behind people’s backs. People do not seem to be able to imagine that this structural change has its concrete human agents like any other to be observed in history. The sense of powerlessness people feel in the face of this seemingly fated change is one of its most striking characteristics.

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8. “Globalization”

The metaphor of “globalization” is the expression adopted to conjure up this sense of fatedness – and to make it, at the same time, unassailable.

The life-worlds (“Lebenswelten”) of most actants subsumed under the regularities of (global) economic life, however, remain bound linguistically to communication at the mid-level range. In contrast, the “global players” and their global agents are just as necessarily bound to move throughout the world.

The contradictions between management and those under its command bring forth their own specific linguistic forms. The agents of globalization insist on the unavoidability of transcending mid-range communication – and thus its languages. These agents apply the characteristics of “globaliza-tion” to the language situation, and in doing so, they claim that the linguis-tic change resulting from such application is inevitable and has the status of a natural process. Plurilingualism, they claim, has to yield to future com-munication needs which, they say, requires thrift of linguistic means – or the reduction of languages and of plurilingualism. Thus, global economy is seen to demand monolingualism.

9. Economy

“Economy”, in both senses of the word, is characteristic of the global movement of capital, at least when it follows its own internal laws and ultimate goals, namely to increase itself and to subsume everything and everyone under its own trends. In one meaning, “economy” is something authorised to become a generally determining anthropological factor. The other meaning of “economy” is the extreme thriftiness that goes hand-in-hand with such authorisation: “Being economical” is the engine that drives “economy”. Economy affects all areas relevant to it, including communica-tion, in as much as communication is relevant for production and distribu-tion. The opposite of economy are the faux frais, those false costs whose legitimation is based on non-economic grounds that can overshadow or even ruin the realisation of profit. The economically unnecessary has to succumb to the spell of economy. To ferret such costs out and minimise or even eliminate them calls for enormous effort. In the accounting of unnec-essary ancillary costs, plurilingualism is one of the items, and perhaps even a significant one. Quite naturally, the rationalisation of communication then


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becomes a subsidiary goal of economic management. A uniform world language of trade, circulation, and production emerges as a goal whose achievement seems to be adequately guaranteed by the usual means em-ployed to accomplish economic rationality. As for communication, faith in the “self regulation of the market” has the following consequence: Only those who submit to the forces of linguistic-economic rationality will be able to assert themselves “in the competition”. An economised history will ignore all the rest.

The choice of the language that appears suited for this task – unlike those which have been propagated by the developers and propagandists of artificially created languages – can occur without further consideration, and in particular, without taking into account anything other than the economic reasons that alone are seen as justified. Given the obvious dependence on individual languages that characterises human communication, the choice is subjected to the blindness of the linguistic market. A quite simple equation favours that language whose speakers already represent the major power in the marketplace. Other possible arguments recede (for example, those based on the number of speakers) or are rejected as self-discrediting. Economy also provides an economic metaphor for the communicative “leftovers” of this process, i.e. for the other languages and their undeniable survival: they are luxury. Plurilingualism luxuriates.

10. Monolingualism as an economic goal

Just as a side effect, economic monolingualism would, of course, resolve the conflict between – abstract – language and the diversity of concrete languages. Economic monolingualisation would thus actually achieve what was previously subject to speculation about a universal language in the past or genetic universals in the present: a (re-)unification of a linguistically divided humankind (cf. sec. 1 above). In this respect, economic rationalism participates in a retrograde utopia whose fulfilling agent it may become without even intending to do so. Economic rationalism could thus celebrate itself as being in accordance with an – even higher – communicative ra-tionality of these utopias.

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11. The scholarly neglect of plurilingualism

Economic monolingualisation would do away with any requirement to re-flect about language at all – a requirement scholarship in any case dis-pensed with during antiquity and scholasticism by feeling “above” plurilin-gualism and availing itself of the respective “real” ecumenical language of its time, seeing and treating it as the only real language. This occurred at the beginning of systematic thinking, when Greek was seen as being supe-rior to all other stammering and babbling of “barbaric” human mouths un-worthy of recognition. Latin, Greek’s illegitimate heir, also adopted this attitude, though it made an exception for Greek itself, a language it could neither pass over nor avoid, as people long remained conscious of Latin’s intellectual dependence on Greek. In this way of thinking, talking of lan-guage always and as a matter of course meant speaking of one’s own lan-guage, the language one spoke and thought in. (In this respect, the specula-tions about a universal grammar are embedded in a tradition that is readily understandable – though with the not quite irrelevant difference that knowledge of language and of plurilingualism in the world (due precisely to colonialist expansion) can hardly be neglected with the ethnocentric naïveté with which both the Greek and Latin theoreticians sought to ignore it).

12. The teleological function of language

The use of language for economic transactions constitutes, without doubt, an important aspect of language itself. For language exists for purposes beyond its own organisation, and it is this teleological function of language a part of which is realized in economic transactions. The teleological func-tion of language constitutes the illocutionary dimension of linguistic inter-action. This dimension is, however, not limited to economic transactions alone, while these transactions necessitate a wide range of illocutions be-yond the obvious, i.e. beyond offer and order, rejection and accusation,negotiation and contract.

Illocutionary acts are only a part of what occurs communicatively in the economy. Cormmunicative aspects, particularly in the production of goods meant to circulate globally, increasingly are being stripped of language and absorbed by the materiality of the actual production sites. With this, a sig-nificant aspect of living labour is transformed into dead labour – something


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that has been little researched from a communication analysis point of view. The increasing use of information technology takes on particular signifi-cance here.

13. The gnoseological function of language

The functionality of language is not exhausted by its teleological, and thus immediately economically transformable, function. There are at least two other functions, namely the knowledge-orientated or gnoseological, and the community-orientated or communitarian, functions.

However the debate about the mutual dependence of language and thought (and thus the impact of language on the origin of our species) will be settled – there is little disagreement that thought and language entertain a close interrelationship. Human thought is based in language, and lan-guage makes knowledge mnemonically manipulable and communicable.

At the same time, this calls forth plurilingualism as a key characteristic of the world of languages. The relationship between language and thought never involves language per se, but individual, specific languages that serve to encode, develop and pass on knowledge. Languages and knowl-edge thereby offer different possibilities as to how this relationship is formed and inwardly structured.

Particularly the adaptation of European vernacular languages to the needs of scholarly communication and systematic expansion of knowledge has resulted in a loss of ethnocentric naïveté. This is true even though re-searchers themselves have only slowly become aware of it and – while reduplicating the aforementioned procedures to overcome the difference between language per se and individual languages – make a program of assumed universal monolingualism.

For innovation in research, plurilingualism means gnoseological re-source diversity, and thus is anything but a mere luxury. Plurilingualism is a resource for the further development of human thought. To neglect this resource or to give it up completely would be negligence and would even mean forseeable economic damage.

The hypothesis of the ultimate grounding of all artificial languages in ordinary language is in fact a hypothesis concerning individual languages.To reflect on the theoretical implications of this is the task of a future phi-losophy of language that is conscious of the relationship between thought and languages.

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14. The communitarian function of language

The third function of language, the communitarian, presents still another picture. Language has a fundamental role to play in group identity that it did not only, or did not first, adopt as part of the national project. Rather, this is precisely one of the essential functions of each individual language. How group formation looks in the particular case calls for a differentiated view, and to reconstruct the diversity of social forms brought about through language, or to reconstruct the processes of societal formation, would be the role of an advanced sociology of language.

The communitarian function of language is not one that can be decreed to vanish. This is not least to be seen in one of the grand politico-social experiments in plurilingualism, namely the the EU (cf. Coulmas 1991). Officially, the EU is committed to plurilingualism, but it has yet to fully realise the challenge this engenders. Nothing expresses this more clearly than the EU budget, as it serves as a barometer from which one can read the importance of individual aspects of EU policy: The relevant department, with its 30 Million Euros, namely the one responsible for operationalising plurilingualism in the EU, does not even account for one one-thousandth of the budget.

The communitarian function of languages calls for careful consideration. Some of the “global players” have had to learn this painfully when their attempts to eliminate by decree the “luxury” of pluriligualism failed.

15. Linguistic “luxury” as a necessary good

Economic monolingualism is an understandable goal of an economy that reduces language to being just a part of its functions, namely those which are immediately necessary in the short term. This makes the diversity of languages, which have social roles to play, as well as individual plurilin-gualism, appear to be a luxury, one which has to be considered as faux fraisin the account ledgers.

Such a view ignores the teleological role language plays as a communi-cative device constitutive for the human species. It dispenses with the gnoseological resources of individual languages. It also underestimates their communitarian functions that are essential for identity and identities whose – potentially dangerous – loss can scarcely be politically dealt with in a monolingual world. The conscious, reflected and respectful manage-


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ment of “difference” is one of the great challenges for a world society, be-cause in this society withdrawal into exterritorial and extramundane niches is as little an option as succumbing to the hegemonic – and supposedly “natural” – laws of capital and their inherently limited rationality. The pro-tagonists and propagandists of this rationality view as a luxury what is in fact an indispensible and inalienable aspect of language, for language con-sists of languages; or, to put it in a manner of speaking familiar to those protagonists: languages are a luxury a world society should afford because it needs this luxury for its own preservation and development.

References

Coulmas, Florian 1991 A Language Policy for the E. C. Berlin/New York: Mouton de

Gruyter. Ehlich, Konrad

1994 Communication disruptions. On benefits and disadvantages of lan-guage contact. In Language Contact and Language Conflict, Martin Pütz (ed.), 103–122. Amsterdam /Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Sauer, Hans 2004 Das Englische und die Entstehung von Pidgin- und Kreolsprachen.

In Sprachtod und Sprachgeburt, Peter Schrijver, Peter-Arnold Mumm (eds.), 187–226. Bremen: Hempen Verlag.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 2000 Linguistic Genocide in Education – or Worldwide Diversity and

Human Rights? Mahwah NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

The author expresses his gratitude to Ralph Bendix for his translation of a difficult German text into English, and to Winfried Thielmann for his discussion and im-provement of the text of the article. The author is responsible for all remaining inconveniences to the English reader, and he apologizes for them. – Special thanks go to Florian Coulmas who made it possible for me to participate in a highly stimu-lating and multi-facetted conference and in intellectually stimulating discussions.

Challenges for language policy in today’s Japan

Nanette Gottlieb

Japan today is a very different place from the Japan of the late 1940s and 1950s when most of its official language (and particularly script) policies were first promulgated. Although those policies were re-evaluated over the period 1965–1991 in the wake of conservative unease about a perceived watering-down of standards (Gottlieb 1994), the changes made as a result were not significant. The existing policies therefore reflect a set of condi-tions which in many instances may no longer be entirely valid as determi-nants of language policy in the 21st century. Policies cannot remain static, any more than the conditions they are designed to address remain un-changed over time. In Japan’s case, globalization and other factors such as technological developments have wrought sufficient social change to war-rant a rethinking of language policy in terms of new goals which better represent the current situation. In this chapter, I will examine some of the issues I see as constituting challenges for language planning and policy in Japan today.

Despite Miller’s observation (1982: 180–181) that language planning is practised only in developing third-world countries and does not exist in Japan, it has in fact been carried on there since the early years of the twentieth cen-tury, although Katsuragi (2004: 326) questions whether “planning” is not too strong a word for what the Japanese authorities are doing these days”. East-man defines language planning as “the activity of manipulating language as a social resource in order to reach objectives set out by planning agencies which, in general, are an area’s governmental, educational, economic and linguistic authorities” (1983:29), a definition which is valuable for its explicit recognition of the nature of language as social capital. Blommaert (1996:207) further sees language planning as covering “all cases in which authori-ties attempt, by whatever means, to shape a sociolinguistic profile for their society”. There is no doubt that, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, language planning and its policy outcomes were actively pursued in Japan.

At present, typical areas of intervention in language issues are handled by a number of ministries and agencies. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has responsibility for issues af-

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fecting the national language through the National Language Subdivision of the Council for Cultural Affairs; the promotion of English and other foreign languages through CLAIR (Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, a joint initiative of MEXT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications); and the National Insti-tute for Japanese Language (Kokken) for the teaching of Japanese as a for-eign language within Japan, as well as major research projects on the Japa-nese language. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promotes and supports the teaching of Japanese language overseas through the Japan Foundation, while the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (Hokkaido Bu-reau) and MEXT jointly set up the Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture in 1997 for the promotion of Ainu language classes (the language of Japan’s indigenous inhabitants).

Given the changes impacting on language which have occurred in the last few decades, I suggest that what is called for now is a shift from the relatively segmented way of thinking about language issues exemplified by the spread of sites listed above to a more global approach which acknowl-edges the hybridity of language issues within society as a whole. People in Japan live today in a very different environment from the earlier more insu-lar and monolingual era. Japan has experienced and continues to experience increasing global interaction encompassing tourism, educational exchange, job seeking, migration and business ventures. The present policies, while still apt in many ways, reflect the needs and socially partitioned thinking of an earlier period. While a very significant attitudinal shift would be re-quired, perhaps it is now time to move towards developing and implement-ing an overarching language policy which recognises the permeability of nation-state borders in today’s globalising world and addresses its living consequences in the fabric of society. As Maher (2001: vii) has pointed out, it is not the celebration of difference that Japan needs to engage with now but “a growing awareness of social hybridity, life-style heterogeneity and cultural crossing … a creole aesthetic in which “to be” means “to freely choose”. It is this social hybridity which ought to be reflected in the type of language policy developed to fit the needs of a country such as Japan which is presently dealing with the gradually emerging awareness of the implica-tions of growing multiculturalism for its society.

Such a policy would accommodate both the global (the study of English, modes of Internet use, the study of other foreign languages), the regional (increased promotion of the study of neighbouring languages) and the local (national language issues, effect of technology on language). It would view

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internal language diversity as a resource rather than as a threat; would sup-port the continuing teaching and use of the Ainu language to avoid lan-guage death; would take a coordinated approach to the teaching of Japanese as a second/foreign language both in Japan and overseas; and would de-velop a coordinated stance on language-in-education policies which takes account of the reality of new social constituencies. The last of these, in particular, will become increasingly important as the number of migrant children in the school system continues to increase. Language difficulties can lead to failure to thrive in the education system, which in turn often leads to feelings of alienation and poor self-esteem, resulting in a section of the community remaining largely disaffected. Japan is still a very long way from actively embracing multicultural ideals and practices (the census, for example, does not allow recording of separate ethnic identity, Siddle 2003: 461). The earlier the debate about the management of multilingualism be-gins, however, the better it will be in both the long and short term.

Ricento (2000) conceptualises three stages in the development of lan-guage policy: the early stage where language was viewed as both a prag-matic resource and a tool for nation building, the 1970s and 80s when the neutral view of language gave way to a critical awareness of the ideological trappings of language policy, and the present stage in which the focus is on global flows and identity interactions. It is this third stage in which Japan now finds itself, while its existing language policies are largely derived from the first stage. To persuade government that a policy such as that out-lined above is in the national interest would require a major rethinking of the fragmented approach currently in place and would need support from all parties as was the case with the Australian national language policy in 1987.

Citizenship and language rights is only one of the issues to be canvassed in the discussion. Is there any point, for example, to retaining a structure where the Japanese language within Japan (kokugo) and the same language outside Japan (nihongo) are treated separately? Since globalization’s first incarnation as an economic concept, it has come to be viewed as a process whereby national borders are rendered increasingly porous by the transmis-sion of cultural, social, intellectual, economic and human capital. “There is general consensus that the cornerstones of modern governance, especially the symmetries forged largely in the past two centuries between national states, national territory, and national citizenship rights, have been progres-sively fractured by transnational networks, flows, and identities” (Brodie 2004: 323). Within that process, Befu (2001) and others have argued, glob-

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alization should not be seen as a uni-linear progression emanating from the West as the sole centre but rather as a multi-centric process where Japan constitutes one of the central nodes rather than being on the periphery. Seen in this light, policies for promoting the study of Japanese by others ought surely to rank equally with those relating to the study of Japanese by Japa-nese, rather than being of secondary importance in the policy framework as is sometimes implied.

The connection between Japanese-for-us and Japanese-for-others is al-ready strong, of course, with a two-way flow of interaction between the two. The Japanese taught as a foreign or second language is naturally informed by the policies relating to Japanese as first language, while the National Language Council (Kokugo Shingikai) (2000) suggested that the spread of Japanese-language education overseas reinforces the need for the Japanese used by native speakers to be of high quality and “suited to international communication”. Section 6 of the current Action Plan to cultivate Japanese with English Abilities underlines the importance to successful communica-tion in English of students’ levels of competence in their own language. “Also, in order to foster Japanese people rich in humanity with an aware-ness of society, who will live as members of an international society, it is important to enhance students’ thinking ability, foster students’ strength of expression and sense of language, deepen their interest in the Japanese language, and nurture an attitude of respect for the Japanese language” (MEXT 2003). In response to a request from the Minister of Education to work on this, the Subdivision on National Language of the Council for Cultural Affairs produced a report in 2004 setting out strategies to achieve these aims (Bunka Shingikai 2004).

I turn now to three aspects of language in Japan where policy change is indicated by changing circumstances.

1. Increasing ethnic diversity

“The biggest shift under the influence of globalization discourse”, (Canaga-rajah 2005: xx) reminds us, “is that the nation-state (the basic unit of lan-guage planning hitherto) is now of reduced relevance for such purposes. We need policy frameworks that accommodate domains both larger and smaller than the nation-state … Our policies have to be mindful of the po-rous borders that open up each country to people, goods and ideas that shut-tle across communities. On the other hand, we are now increasingly sensi-


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tive to pockets of language groups – immigrants, minorities, and “virtual communities” of cyberspace – who were previously swept under the carpet of national unity and homogeneous community”.

This observation is certainly true of Japan, where in late 2001 around two million foreigners lived, 1.770 million of them registered and 224,000 undocumented foreign residents (=illegal immigrants) (SMJ 2004). The former number – which includes the large numbers of people of Korean and Chinese descent who live in Japan as a result of historical forces – ac-counts as yet for only around 1.5% of the population. The birthrate contin-ues to fall, however: in 2004 it dropped to a record low of 1.28, one of the lowest in the world (Head 2005), mirroring the falling birthrate in other developed countries brought about in part by economic globalization. De-clining birthrates lead in turn to demand for labour which in many countries is met by foreign immigrants, so that “as a result of this dynamic we see a massive proliferation of multicultural and multilingual societies in all parts of the world. All parts of the globe and all national states, no matter how ideologically committed to singular prescriptive norms of the national iden-tity, can ignore diversity or pluralism at the demographic level” (Lo Bianco 2004).

If immigration numbers continue to rise in Japan, which they are highly likely to do, then the social mix will change dramatically over time. In re-sponse to a United Nations population projection in 1998, Japan drew up several scenarios. Scenario 3 posited that “If Japan wishes to keep the size of population at the level attained in the year 2005, the country would need 17 million net immigrants up to the year 2050, or an average of 381,000 immigrants per year between 2005 and 2050. By 2050, the immigrants and their descendants would total 22.5 million and comprise 17.7 per cent of the total population of the country”. Scenario 4 found the following: “In order to keep the size of the working-age population constant at the 1995 level or 87.2 million, Japan would need 33.5 million immigrants from 1995 through 2050. This means an average of 609,000 immigrants needed per year during this period. Under this scenario, the population of the country is projected to be 150.7 million by 2050. The number of post-1995 immi-grants and their descendants would be 46 million, accounting for 30 per cent of the total population in 2050”. Other scenarios took the figures even higher (United Nations Population Division 2001).

These figures are of course only projections, but there can be little doubt that Japan’s immigration levels will need to rise to meet the demand for labour. The academic field of citizenship studies reflects this concern with

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shifting demographics, with scholars such as Boli and Thomas (1999) and Mathews (2000) arguing that citizenship now involves a global dimension which may in time transcend its former dependence on a specific national territory. Others seek to redefine the concept for multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multicultural societies (Chung 2003). Mathews, in the context of a discussion of culture, asks: “Is there really any such thing as an American, or Japanese, or Chinese culture that defines all Americans, Japanese, Chi-nese in common, as opposed to non-Americans, non-Japanese, non-Chinese?”(p.1).

Extending Mathews’ question to the area of language policy, we may ask in what ways and to what extent does language policy in today’s Japan need to rethink its current model, where monolingualism has been its major field of influence under the guidance of the Ministry of Education (now MEXT) with other-language issues relegated to the care of other ministries unrelated to education, as we saw above. The prevailing ideology, with the instrumental exception of English, has been that of an ostensibly monolin-gual populace, despite the presence of substantial ethnic communities. It was not until 1997 that language planning first included mention of one of them, the indigenous Ainu community, and steps were taken to prevent loss of the Ainu language. A language policy for today, however, needs to em-brace all issues of language within the country under a comprehensive um-brella. Multilingualism should no longer be viewed as a source of instabil-ity and a threat to security, with monolingualism therefore to be preferred within the country itself. What is called for now is a recognition in lan-guage-in-education policies of the value of linguistic diversity.

It is not a question of recognition of that diversity in some way subtract-ing from the importance of Japanese as the national language but rather of recognition of the potential of that diversity as an important national re-source that should be fostered and promoted. This requires a step away from past ways of thinking towards a clear-eyed vision of – and willingness to accept – the future. As Lo Bianco (2004) points out, the key to success in having institutions accept effective language policies is not so much the processes involved but the ability to talk persuasively about imagining new national futures: “in short, the strength of policy making is a lot about forg-ing a persuasive way to talk about multilingualism and language learning”. Language issues are further strongly linked to equity; new arrivals whose language needs are not met are likely to feel alienated and to flounder, per-ceiving themselves as “second class citizens” unable to fully participate in public life because of linguistic limitations. In Japan, where a key binary


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has always been “Japanese vs foreigner” (Burgess 2004), it will take some time to unpick these issues, but progress is crucial to Japan’s evolving iden-tity if it is not to remain bound by the practices of the past. The most impor-tant word there is “evolving”: can national identity be seen as something dynamic and open to change rather than fixed and immobile?

Migrants living in Japan are carving out new identities for themselves in their adopted communities, whether that be for a few years or for the long haul. It is only to be expected that they will attempt – and indeed are at-tempting – to play an active role in the formulation of language policies affecting, in particular, their children. “Migrants are not only products of global change but also a powerful force for further change. Through their everyday experiences and (re)constructions of individual identity, migrants can plant the “seeds of social change” at the grassroots level” (Burgess 2004). At this grassroots level, and local government level, change has already been embraced in many areas, with local networks such as SMJ (Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan) and RINK (Rights of Immigrants Network in Kansai) being set up to assist new arrivals. Foreign residents’ assemblies have been set up by some local governments in areas which have attracted large numbers of immigrants (Kashiwazaki 2002 and 2003). A crucial area which has begun to receive attention is the treatment of the children of migrants in Japanese schools, of whom, in 2002, there were around 74,000 (Himeno n.d.). The academic literature in recent years has begun to investigate the sorts of consequences for national identity that can flow from substantial numbers of individuals in communities reconstruct-ing their own personal identities. An important component of that identity is the linguistic dimension and this must eventually be reflected in language policy.

2. Writing and technology

One of the prime manifestations of cultural and other types of globalization today is the Internet, a supposedly borderless technology which enables faster and wider communication between those populations and sections of populations which are fortunate enough to have access to the technology. Japanese was in 1998 the second most widely used language other than English on the Internet, although it has since 2000 been overtaken by Chi-nese and, more recently, Spanish (Global Internet Statistics by Language 2004). None of today’s ability to create Japanese-language Web pages and

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email would have been possible without the emergence of technology per-mitting electronic character retrieval in the 1980s.

One of the most obvious changes relating to language policy, then, has been in the nature of how Japanese is written. If we look at the majority of the existing policies relating to Japanese as the national language, formu-lated by the National Language Council before its restructuring in 2001 into the Subdivision on National Language of the Council for Cultural Affairs, we can clearly see that they relate to an earlier incarnation of Japan in which the concept of writing was predicated upon handwriting. Writing by hand imposed burdens on the memory, given the size of the character set, and therefore it made sense to draw up a list of a certain number of charac-ters considered most useful for general use in both writing and reading. Today, however, electronic retrieval of characters in word processing pro-grams means that the limits on memory are no longer a factor constraining the writing of characters; what is more important now is the ability to rec-ognise and differentiate between the characters provided by the word proc-essing program’s memory in order to produce an error-free text. And of course this applies not only to computer screens: in March 2005, 60% of Japan’s population accessed Internet services through their mobile phones (Information and Communication Economy Office 2005).

This very significant technological advance, which led to a new and dif-ferent way of both conceptualising and implementing writing in Japanese, resulted in the 1980s and early 1990s in discussion in academic and pub-lishing circles as to whether existing language policies ought to be changed now that it was no longer necessary always to write characters by hand. Some (e.g. Kabashima 1988; Kida, Furuse et al. 1987; Kanda 1984; Yoko-yama 1984) argued that a large, multi-faceted character set was by the complexity of its nature more suited to production by machine than by hu-man beings. The availability of word processing software meant that an official script policy which designated a limited number of characters for general use was no longer necessarily appropriate. Some gave either quali-fied or strong support for a reconsideration of script policy in one form or another (Gottlieb 2000 Chapter 3), the most commonly held view being that the List of Characters for General Use should be expanded to around 3,000 characters from the present 1,945, with the majority to be taught for recognition only and only a small number for reproduction. The rationale for this was that as long as a writer was able to input a character’s correct pronunciation in kana or r maji, the conversion process would take care of


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the output and as long as the reader could recognise the characters, reading comprehension would be assured.

As we know, the number of characters held in software dictionaries far exceeds the 1,945 on the List of Characters for General Use, supplemented by characters used in personal and place names which do not appear on that list. This would not even allow sufficient scope to produce newspaper and magazine articles, for which various surveys have found that around 3,000 characters are needed (Tanaka 1991: 59–60). What software memories contain are the JIS (Japan Industrial Standards) characters, a total of over 12,000. The characters included in these lists were decided not by the Min-istry of Education as in the case of the script policy list but by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI, formerly MITI), and were meant not for information processing but for information exchange between com-puters (Nomura 1991: 34–35). No ordinary reader/writer, of course, or even one who was a specialist in a particular field requiring out of the ordinary kanji, would ever be likely to need that number. But the fact remains that many thousands of characters are now available to users at the touch of a button should they choose to avail themselves of the opportunity.

This represents a significant shift in both mindset and options from the dependence on handwriting which prevailed when the postwar script poli-cies were formulated, when the goals of rationalising and streamlining character use through a set of inter-related policies were realised. In a sense the current situation mimics the prewar situation when no policy on the number of characters for general use existed, but the underlying thinking is different. Whereas in the prewar era suggestions to rationalise the number of characters were viewed as an almost treasonous attack on their role in state ideology as the embodiment of Japanese cultural heritage, today the plethora of computer-mediated characters is viewed more as an opportunity for personal display and differentiation in creating texts for a specific pur-pose such as publicity or invitations rather than as a generalised belief that the number of characters ordinarily used should be widely expanded. Clearly people are still products of the school education system, where a restricted number of characters is taught; they need to be able to read what-ever is written, no matter how fancy the entire character set may be.

Language policy deliberations since the 1990s, although affirming in principle the importance of reconsidering how Japanese should be written in the information technology age, have skirted this issue and concentrated on rationalising the shapes of those characters used in computers which are not in the List of Characters for General Use. However, the minutes of the

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Kokugo Bunkakai’s sub-committee on national language education show that the issue has been discussed recently, in response to a request from the Education Minister that the committee consider what to do about the fact that electronic character retrieval had led to the reappearance of characters that could be recognised but were too difficult to write by hand. Sugges-tions ranged from revising the List into a form more appropriate to the computer age to forgetting all about any sort of character list and using hiragana glosses for difficult characters instead (Bunka Shingikai 2003).

In time, perhaps, voice recognition software such as SpeechWorks and Dragon, which claims a recognition ration of 99% and allows input at three times the speed of keyboard input, will also bring pressure to bear on exist-ing policies. SpeechWorks is claimed to be able to handle regional dialects in Japan as well as standard Japanese (JETRO 2002). On 1 July 2005, Mi-crosoft set up a collaborative research network with six Japanese universi-ties including the University of Tokyo to conduct research into, among other things, speech recognition software (Reuters 2005). Microsoft itself speaks of the speech recognition function in Windows Office XP as “a huge advantage to Chinese and Japanese users, for whom typing in their native language can be a slow and laborious process” (Microsoft 2001). Research is needed into who uses this software and for what purposes and whether it is likely in time to spread as fast as the wordprocessor did in the 1980s once its capacities become more widely known outside the business sector, where it is used in the call centre market.

As computers, the Internet and mobile phones continue to become more and more part of daily life, and the last generation who depended on hand-writing alone disappears, language policy will need to do more than merely take note of the implications of life in the electronic age. It will need to come to grips with the realities of those changes for realistic language planning in the area of written Japanese, by investigating changing patterns of writing consequent upon the adoption of these technologies and reformu-lating the policies to match today’s realities. The trajectory here is from handwriting to computer printout to possible voice-recognition computer printout. Current language policy guidelines on kanji use have been in force since 1981, i.e. just before the fall in price of personal wordprocessors made them accessible to many and sales took off, and have not changed to accommodate that fact. Figures found in the Statistical Handbook of Japan 2004 indicate that the proportion of Japan’s population who grew up in the time when handwriting was the norm is rapidly ageing; even someone born in the early 1980s, when word processing took off, would be in their early


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to mid-twenties now, with subsequent generations never having known a time when electronic character input and output was not possible. It is time now to reconsider the policy options. Questions for the future might in-clude: does the policy any longer mirror practice? Is practice at all influ-enced by policy, except for in the schoolroom? What is the best way to come to terms with the impact of technology? Is it likely to be necessary to redefine literacy in the light of technology? These considerations are im-portant for reflecting upon whether the script policies in place today require revision or not.

3. The teaching of other languages in Japan

The teaching of English is of course a major plank in Japan’s language policies and has received considerably increased attention in funding and policy terms over the last few years. Japan has long taught English, but – until recently – on its own terms, e.g. with teacher-centric, grammar trans-lation based teaching methodologies which produced a populace unable to speak English with any degree of facility (a linguistic example of the local negotiating, modifying and absorbing the global in its own way).

In 2003, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Tech-nology (MEXT) issued a press release announcing a strategic plan for im-proving the English abilities of Japanese citizens, followed by an Action Plan to cultivate Japanese with English Abilities setting specific proficiency targets for junior and senior high school graduates. Universities were ex-horted to set their own targets such that graduates could use English in their work. Strategies to be used to achieve these targets included upgrading of teacher proficiency and of pedagogical methods; improving motivation for learning English through study abroad and other means; and designating 100 high schools as Super English Language High Schools with part of the curriculum to be taught in English. From 2006, the central university en-trance examination will include a listening test in addition to a written test (MEXT 2003). It will be interesting to evaluate in ten years’ time what effect these strategies have had.

The press release made an explicit link between this action plan and globalization:

With the progress of globalization in the economy and in society, it is essen-tial that our children acquire communication skills in English, which has

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become a common international language, in order for living in the 21st century. This has become an extremely important issue both in terms of the future of our children and the further development of Japan as a nation. At present, though, the English-speaking abilities of a large percentage of the population are inadequate, and this imposes restrictions on exchanges with foreigners and creates occasions when the ideas and opinions of Japanese people are not appropriately evaluated (MEXT 2002).

The action plan was the next step on from the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) program introduced in 1987 in part in order to promote a shift towards a more communicative focus in language teaching in schools through the provision of Assistant Language Teachers in classrooms to offer native-speaker contact. A 2001 evaluation of the program’s effective-ness reported high degrees of satisfaction from primary, junior and senior high schools taking part. Primary schools spoke of perceived increases in student interest in foreign languages and cultures, ease in mixing with for-eigners and willingness to try communicating in English; high schools re-ported an increase in the number of students attempting the Step Test in Practical English Proficiency (Eiken), officially accredited by the Ministry of Education in 2000 (MEXT 2001). The major emphasis of the JET pro-gram continues to be on English: 5,395 of the 5,567 ALTs in its 2004–2005 intake were from the major English-speaking countries (JET Programme 2005).

There is absolutely no danger in Japan that “local language practices, discourses, and values will be engulfed by the sweeping economic and political forces brought about by globalization” foreshadowed by other parts of the world (Canagarajah 2005: ix). Japanese has never been subject to the metropolitan vs local language dialectic of colonization, even though Suzuki (1991) calls the presence of loanwords a side-effect of a self-colonising mentality and Prime Minister Koizumi has set up a committee to undo their dominance where Japanese equivalents exist. The fact that the majority of Japanese web pages are in Japanese and for Japanese points to the ability of the local language to resist the formerly thought hegemonic use of English on the Net. Where Japan has made a solid attempt to foster English with its latest policies, it is because of the benefits English compe-tence offers in terms of globalising its citizens (at least, if we accept the policy rhetoric) rather than because the local language is under any threat.

The English-related arm of language policy, then, is well promoted and well resourced as part of Japan’s response to globalization. Little more than


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lip service, however, seems to have been paid to the teaching of other lan-guages in the school sector, and this is not appropriate to a comprehensive language policy. A 2005 report on the activities of a specialist committee on foreign languages in the curriculum, for example, devoted all its space to matters relating to English, with only one line relating to other lan-guages: “we need a discussion on the aims and content of classes in foreign languages other than English” (MEXT 2004). Unlike longstanding multi-cultural societies such as the US and Australia where internal linguistic communication needs are seen to exist, “in Japan … foreign languages are learned predominantly to fulfil an external need. People feel there is very little need to use foreign languages internally, and, therefore, are not very motivated to learn them” (Yoshida 2002).

Because Japan has no overarching national language policy specifying whether or which community languages should be taught or whether cer-tain languages should be strategically introduced with a view to Japan’s regional and international linkages, the choice to teach foreign languages other than English is largely up to the particular school. Enrolments in other foreign languages are very small: in 1997 3.5 and 0.9 students in every 1,000 studied Chinese and Korean respectively, dropping to 2.1, 1.1, 0.5 and 0.2 for French, German, Spanish and Russian respectively (The Japan Forum 1998). A total of twenty-two languages was taught in 551 schools that year (about 60% of them government schools) to about 40,000 students. Chinese was the most widely taught, in 372 schools, followed by French in 206, Korean in 131, German in 109 and Spanish in 76 (MEXT 1999, cited in The Japan Forum 1999). By 2003, the figures were not much better. The percentage of all high schools (public and private) teaching foreign lan-guages other than English was: Chinese (8.74%), French (4.32%), Korean (4.03%), Spanish (1.86%), German (1.84%), with minuscule numbers teaching Arabic, Italian, Portuguese and a scattering of Southeast Asian languages (The Japan Forum, 2005:3).

Japan has large ethnic communities of people of Korean and Chinese descent. Many speak only Japanese, but others have worked to preserve their heritage languages through community schools. In addition, many of the foreign students and trainees studying or working in Japan are from South Korea, China and other areas of East and South East Asia. Positive recognition and uptake of this existing linguistic resource in the languages of neighbouring countries could play a part in helping to ease current ten-sions between Japan and its Asian neighbours over wartime memories. Japan could benefit from being seen to be involving itself linguistically

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with its neighbours rather than concentrating only on English. While it is true that English is used as a lingua franca in communication throughout the region, the affective benefits of placing increased importance on the local languages rather than relying on English could be considerable. In-deed, the report in 2000 of the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the Twenty-First Century stressed that the study of English should detract neither from the study of Japanese nor from that of the importance of studying other foreign languages, in particular those of Japan’s nearest and most historically significant Asian neighbours. The report called for a dramatic expansion in the teaching of Korean and Chinese. In practice, though, while advances made in this direction during the 1990s had seen a slight increase, by September 2003 only 246 schools were either teaching Korean or had plans to introduce it by 2005, with 353 offering Chinese (The Japan Forum 2005). English, by contrast, is found in every school.

A focus not only on learning English but on more strategic engagement with Japan’s neighbouring countries, by fostering the study of Korean and Chinese as recommended in the 2000 paper, can only be beneficial. En-gagement means more than providing multilingual signs at airports and web pages, i.e. for people coming in, important as those measures are. It means reaching out, as well, at grassroots level. A decision to promote the teaching of the languages of the neighbours will do more to foster ties than any amount of political rhetoric, especially given that the majority of for-eign students studying at Japanese universities in 2003 came from China and Korea (MEXT 2005). A language policy for today needs to consider these issues and set out a national position on the learning of other lan-guages.

4. Conclusion

There are many issues which a unified language policy in a Japan re-imagining its future would encompass, and I have touched on only three. In relation to multilingualism, much can be learned from the experience of other countries whose societies have likewise diversified, and it is probably consultation of this sort which could most profitably form the first step in rethinking language policy in an age of globalization. To reiterate: the overarching goals a language policy in Japan today should seek to address are recognition for and support of linguistic diversity, successful integration of newcomers through language in education policies and other measures,


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continued support for the Ainu language, enhancement of the role of for-eign languages in education, promotion of the teaching of Japanese both inside and outside Japan, and action on the implications of technology for language use and hence language policy.

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Is the promotion of languages such as German and Japanese abroad still appropriate today?

Ulrich Ammon

1. The goals of policies of promoting a language abroad

In his speech to the German-Japanese Society in Berlin in 1902, Jintaro Omura praised Kaiser Wilhelm’s financial support for the teaching of Ger-man in Japan. He said the Kaiser made “a considerable, regular contribu-tion out of his own purse” to the budget of the Association of German Stud-ies’ school, which had been operating since 1884. At the time, Omura him-self was director of that school (Omura 1902: 44, 42). What he called the Kaiser’s private purse was a fund which the emperor could spend as he saw fit. The motivation behind this generosity may be guessed at from Omura’s comments on the effect the institution was having: “More than 200 Ger-man-trained lawyers, who are currently serving their fatherland [that is, Japan – U.A.] as government officials, judges, lawyers, etc., have passed through the school. I do not need to go into further detail about the great significance that the continuation of this school has for the promotion of German science and the spread of German ideas and culture in East Asia.” It is worth noting that Omura was received personally in Berlin by Wilhelm II; a surviving photograph shows him, head held high, at His Majesty’s side aboard the royal yacht (Album von Dokkyo 1983: 67).

The Kaiser’s generosity must be viewed in the context of a comment by one of his favourite historians, Heinrich von Treitschke: “The future of Germany will largely depend upon how many people will speak German in the future” (cited from Reinbothe 1992: 103f. – translat. U.A.). On the ba-sis of such – admittedly usually more modestly expressed – sentiments, the promotion and dissemination of the German language became a standard component of foreign cultural policy in the days of the German Empire. Indeed after World War I, language promotion policy – from here on, I will simply call it language promotion – was intensified. One indication of this was the founding of key organizations such as the Goethe Institute (1932, predecessor: the Deutsche Akademie, founded 1925). And today, Germany and other German-speaking countries continue to pursue a policy of pro-moting the language abroad (Ammon 1989; 1991: 540–562). But succes-

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sive governments have failed to give concise reasons for this. Are these reasons obvious – as Omura believed in 1902? Or is there the fear that this policy’s legitimacy would be called into question?

Germany has hardly been a pacesetter in the policies of promoting one’s language abroad. Rather, it was France which began much earlier – after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 – and which served as a model for Germany’s language policy abroad. The Alliance Française was founded in 1883, long before the Goethe Institute (on more recent French policy cf. Christ 2000). Equally, the Anglo-Saxon countries have long had a policy of spreading the English language which continues today – when one could be forgiven for thinking there is no further need for it (Phillipson 2000). Italy, Spain, and many other states also spend considerable sums on attempts to spread their languages throughout the world (Ammon, Kleinei-dam 1992; Ammon 1994). Japan is no exception here, as Fumiya Hi-rataka’s (1992) study has shown.

In order to distinguish between goals and operational areas, one should distinguish between internal (or domestic) and external language promo-tion (or promotion abroad) – in line with the difference between domestic and foreign policy. It is possible to promote a language domestically by introducing it into certain domains, e.g., teaching at universities or colleges. In accordance with a proposal for language planning originally made by Heinz Kloss and later amended by Robert L. Cooper (1989), it is possible to further distinguish between the promotion of language status, language acquisition (corresponding Cooper’s “acquisition planning”), and language corpus. Status promotion of a language involves anchoring it in domains or institutions; acquisition promotion means disseminating the language among speakers; while corpus promotion involves improvements to the language structure, e.g., by creating new terminology. In the following, I will limit my discussion to language promotion abroad, which is primarily status and acquisition promotion, and will at best draw a few comparisons with domestic and corpus promotion.

Countries which can afford it often spend hundreds of millions or even several billion euros on the promotion of their language abroad, usually along with promotion of their culture. This expenditure is partially offset by income from language courses and other sources of revenue. For instance, the Goethe Institute, the most important though not the only German insti-tution promoting the German language abroad, has a current budget pro-vided by the Foreign Ministry of approximately € 250m, compared with income from language teaching of some € 50m. The very size of the or-

Is the promotion of languages still appropriate 55

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ganizations charged with this duty reveals the intensity of the effort. Along with the Goethe Institute there are the Japan Foundation, the British Coun-cil (U.K.), the Instituto Cervantes (Spain) etc., and there are mostly still other institutions of the countries involved whose task, among others, is promoting their languages abroad.

Why do these countries make such a huge effort to promote their lan-guages abroad? As I mentioned above, there is a remarkable lack of sys-tematic, explicit justifications for this; one is therefore largely forced to extrapolate from mere comments and other flimsy sources. The following list of what in my eyes are the most important reasons is therefore hypo-thetical. I have compiled it largely intuitively on the basis of my relatively wide reading, especially of German and French government documents, without explicitly referring to any of them. I hope I will at some point be able to present readers with more explicit evidence. I would be grateful for any suggestions. I will take Germany and the German language as my ref-erence point for demonstrating my argument; in their place one could take – cum grano salis – Japan and the Japanese language or other examples.

I assume that countries expect the following advantages from the suc-cessful promotion of their language (usually their official and national lan-guage) abroad:

(1) Better economic ties (Those who learn German are more likely to later maintain economic

links with Germany.) (2) Improvement of their image (Those who learn German tend to develop a positive image of Ger-

many.) (3) Communicative advantages (People abroad who know German make it easier for Germans to com-

municate.) (4) Dissemination of one’s own values and culture (Those who learn German receive more input from Germany and are

thereby more exposed to German cultural values.) (5) Gain of human capital (People with an understanding of German are more likely to be willing

to work for or in Germany.) (6) Enhanced status of the language

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(A language’s communicative reach is extended by growth in the num-ber of speakers, even non-native speakers, thereby raising the value of knowing the language.)

(7) Self-supporting further increase in status (A language with more people learning or speaking it will attract still

more who want to learn it.) (8) Income from the “language industry” (More sales of language courses and goods linked to the language.) (9) Strengthening of identity (Governments and citizens experience greater self-esteem due to a

stronger status of their language abroad, thus their pride in their nation and language community will be strengthened.)

Most of these assumed advantages sound fairly obvious, to such a degree that it may seem superfluous to test them empirically. Yet in my view, the lack of serious attempts to test them is astonishing if one thinks of the mag-nitude of the “investment” in language promotion abroad. I do not know of a single systematic test of any of these assumptions, not even of such key assumptions as (1) and (2). This, however, does not mean that no studies have been carried out. I would be grateful for any information on this mat-ter.

To make things clear: I am not talking here about language spread gen-erally and not even about all aspects of language promotion abroad. It seems important to distinguish between the countries seeking to spread their language (the subjects of language promotion) and their target coun-tries (the objects of language promotion). I am discussing here language promotion primarily from the perspective of the originating countries (in the case of German, from the point of view of Germany). A more compre-hensive analysis would have to incorporate the target countries – in the case of Germany, for instance, Japan, or to be more precise, the German lan-guage oriented policy of Japan, e.g. government requirements for foreign language curricula in schools and the lifting of the “two foreign language” rule at universities by the Mombusho in 1991 (Shimokawa 1994). The tar-get countries’ regulations regarding the choice of languages would also be of interest, for example, choice of language for diplomatic correspondence or for public signs. However, as stated above, the target countries’ foreign language policy is not my primary topic here. Nor will I go into other ques-tions relevant to language spread and decline such as institutional and indi-vidual choice of learning or using languages (Coulmas 2005).


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2. The status of languages such as German and Japanese in today’s world

There are numerous publications from which we can draw useful informa-tion on this position, i.e. the status and function, of languages such as Ger-man and Japanese in today’s world. Japanese authors have also contributed important insights to the topic (e.g. Nakayama 2002). German and Japanese are similar in various ways, which strike me as important in this context. Those who are primarily interested in cultural content may regard these comparisons as superficial, but for our topic they are important, and par-tially linked to historical parallels. One obvious parallel with considerable ramifications is the fact that, as a consequence of the short life time of the German and Japanese colonial empires, German and Japanese as official languages are restricted to their primary, national and historical region – unlike colonial languages such as English, Spanish, etc., which have spread over several continents. And despite their many differences, German and Japanese have a similar format with regard to other parameters which are important for their languages’ position in the world, such as, in particular, the following:

– The size and compactness of their region as official and national lan-guages;

– The number of native speakers; – The economic power of their native speakers; – The intellectual and technical level of their native speakers; – The status and function of their languages in international organizations

(no official languages of the United Nations); – The extent of their distribution as foreign languages.

According to these parameters, German and Japanese rank way behind English, which is ahead of all other languages in the world – except in the number of native speakers (where Chinese ranks first). As English plays in a league if its own, it has been placed in brackets in the following lists. According to some parameters, German and Japanese are also behind lan-guages other than English. According to their status and function in interna-tional organizations, they rank behind the official languages of the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, (English), French, Russian, and Spanish (in al-phabetical order). According to the size of the region in which the language is an official language, and according to the number of native speakers

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(both parameters considered together – if they were considered separately, other languages would be included) German and Japanese are behind Ara-bic, Chinese, (English), Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu (in alphabetical order).

However, with respect to one parameter, German and Japanese top all the other languages except English, namely according to the economic power of their language communities (native speaker communities). The following rankings are still true – although perhaps not for much longer, given the speed of economic growth in China. Japanese ranks second among the language communities according to GDP and GNP, and German is third – a fact which has been confirmed in various publications (e.g., Graddol 1997: 29). According to their share in world trade, the order is reversed. Here, German is ahead of Japanese, and surpassed only by Eng-lish. Therefore, Graddol ranks German as the overall second most impor-tant language in the world economically, according to his integrated “engco model” (Graddol 1997: 29, 59, 64). Further evidence of the share in world trade is provided by OECD figures. The following table comprises the top five countries according to the latest of these figures, which however, in most cases, do not refer to the whole language community but only to the main countries (figures from The Economist April 23rd, 2005: 101 and May 7th, 2005: 97).

Top exporters: Merchandise exports, 2004, World share, % Germany 10.0 United States 9.0 China 6.5 Japan 6.2 France 4.9

Trade in commercial services: Top exporters, 2004, World share, % United States 15.2 Britain 8.1 Germany 6.0 France 5.2 Japan 4.5

The economic power of their native speakers and, linked to that, possibly their intellectual and technical level appear to be the parameters primarily supporting the position of German and Japanese in today’s global frame-work of languages.


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When it comes to the degree of being studied as a foreign language, German and Japanese have a position in the world similar to French, Span-ish, Italian, Chinese, Russian, and – to a lesser extent – Portuguese, Korean and Dutch (on the rise of Japanese, Coulmas 1987). These languages are studied as foreign languages world-wide, though with considerable varia-tion between regions. The exceptional status of English is, in the frame-work of this parameter particularly noticeable. All these languages can be labelled “international languages”, because they are used beyond national boundaries between native and non-native speakers – even though not al-ways frequently. It is rarer that they are used as lingua franca in the nar-rower sense, i.e. among non-native speakers with different native tongues; that is usually the function of the global language, English.

It is not entirely coincidental that the languages listed above are, at the same time, those whose countries actively promote them abroad. Clearly, these countries believe that this kind of policy is to their own advantage. Of course, they must also be able to afford such a policy. These are countries which are economically strong and populous on the one hand and part of a large language community on the other hand. However, not all countries of a large language community seek to promote their languages abroad, e.g. neither Bangladesh (with regard to Bengali) nor India (with regard to Hindi). Yet for the purposes of our argument I will disregard these excep-tions, and speak of the “countries with a major language (which is widely studied as a foreign language).”

All the countries in this category have similar interests when it comes to promoting their language in the world, from which the interests of the fol-lowing two categories of country differ fundamentally:

(I) The English-speaking countries (with the global language) and (III) Countries with a minor language not widely studied as a foreign lan-

guage. The latter category is of course an oversimplification, because, as noted above, there are also certain countries in this group with a language which has numerous native speakers. The countries previously noted (with languages like German, Japanese, etc.) take up an intermediate position when it comes to their language interests:

(II) Countries with a major language widely studied as a foreign language.

The distinction of these three categories of countries is an intentional sim-plification for the purpose of the present argument. A rank order of coun-

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tries would be more appropriate; it would, however, require more complex phrasings as well as more refined methodological considerations – which I rather try to avoid here, as they are not necessary for the basic issue under discussion.

The question of promoting one's own language abroad poses itself in a fundamentally different manner in Anglo-Saxon countries (Group I) than in the countries in Group II. The former do not need to support their lan-guage’s position in the world, as this virtually happens automatically. In addition, the profitability of language promotion abroad is not in doubt, not even in the crude financial sense. For the United Kingdom, “the language industry” is one of the most important sectors of the economy. This is by no means the case with the countries in Group II. On the contrary, their language promotion abroad has to be constantly justified vis-à-vis opposing politicians or the tax payers.

For the countries in Group III, language promotion abroad has little chance of any success. Their languages are rarely part of foreign language studies abroad. They hardly ever use their own languages for foreign con-tacts, but rely on foreign languages, usually English, for that purpose. Their language interests partly concur with those of the English-speaking coun-tries. In a sense, the countries in Group III are already enticed by the idea of a single global lingua franca, English. It will later become clear what I mean by this. In as much as the countries in Group III seek to promote their languages abroad at all, such language promotion is done for different pur-poses from that of the countries in Group II.

The Countries in Group II, which include Japan and the German-speaking countries (primarily Germany and Austria), find themselves placed between the countries in Groups I and III, in a precarious position. They are in many ways torn between the temptations of a single global language and the advantages of successfully promoting their own languages abroad (with the potential advantages listed in section 1 above). They in-tensify the teaching of English in schools and they introduce university programs taught in English within their own countries on the one hand, while they continue to promote their own language abroad at high costs on the other hand – I assume that for Germany, the recent cuts in the budgets of the Goethe Institute and other language-promoting organizations do not herald a change of strategy in language policy. It seems questionable that both strategies – the promotion of English at home and of their own lan-guage abroad – can be reconciled in the long run. The recent Goethe Insti-tute slogan aimed at students of German as a foreign language – Englisch


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ist ein Muss, Deutsch ist ein Plus (English is a must, German is a plus) – rings hollow in many a German ear.

3. The advantages of having a single language for communication worldwide and of limiting foreign languages studies to just one language

Earlier I spoke of the “temptations” of having just one world language. This choice of words is problematic in one way, as it suggests there is some cheating going on. But in another way, to speak unreservedly of the “ad-vantages” would not fit with my later arguments, in which I seek to demon-strate that a single world language, particularly in combination with the worldwide limitation to just one foreign language also holds severe disad-vantages for the nations of Group II. Just to make it clear: a “single world language” – English, of course, in today’s world – does not mean a mono-lingual world, merely that we would be limited to one language to bridge all the other languages, a language which would be the only foreign tongue learned by native speakers of all the other languages. In this respect, it would be like the once dreamed-of international language Esperanto (Sakaguchi 1987) – with the exception that it would not be a constructed language but the native tongue of a large and powerful language commu-nity. Other languages would be retained as mother tongues. It goes without saying that this model is an ideal, and is at best to be regarded as something which can only be approximately achieved. In particular, it does not ex-clude the possibility that small groups of experts will continue to study other languages in order to gain direct access to other societies and to communicate autochthonous texts. This model therefore allows for the continued existence of German specialists and Japanologists in the strict sense, but not for the wider base of numerous learners of foreign languages.

For the countries in Group III, the advantages of restriction to a single world language can hardly be doubted, nor can there be any doubt of these advantages for English-speaking countries. The countries in Group II also perceive its advantages, as their choice of language and language policy reveals. They use English for important communications – although to dif-fering degrees and complementary to their own language:

– in business, e.g. as a corporate language, particularly in globally-represented, major corporations;

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– in academia, as the language of publications, conferences, and the labora-tory, and even as the language of tertiary level teaching, in the sciences more than the humanities;

– in diplomacy, including through the acceptance of English as the working language of international organizations and conferences;

– in foreign language teaching: by the preference of English over other for-eign languages and by the extension of English lessons to the entire popu-lation, often whilst lessons in other foreign languages are cut back;

– in language corpus politics: via the acceptance of borrowed Anglicisms instead of the creation of neologisms from the reservoir of one’s own lan-guage. In the past, I have written about the “modernization backlog” (Ammon 1991: 277–281) of languages like German and Japanese. But it would be more fitting to speak of “borrowed vocabulary modernization” (or “borrowed modernization”), because modernization is ultimately achieved. By using borrowed words, one is able to express modern con-cepts – it is simply not a modernization using autochthonous language means.

It is easy to see the advantages of the exclusive use of English. They consist primarily of savings in time and money: both when it comes to learning the language and to interpretation and translation (in business, academia, di-plomacy, etc.). Increased modernization of the language with borrowed words also means saving time and money, as the language users, e.g., aca-demics, no longer have to learn and apply two sets of terminology – that is, the English and the autochthonous. In addition, this is a tempting alterna-tive to the effort of learning a foreign language. For instance, instead of spending maybe 5,000 hours learning German, one could spend 5,000 hours reading and thinking about Goethe, Lessing, Thomas Mann, Kant – and why not Marx? – Max Weber, Freud, Einstein and so on – all translated into English. One can imagine the lure of that kind of German Studies or Area Studies – without the pain of learning the language. Given the attrac-tions of a single world language, one wonders what barriers there could possibly be to its swift and complete realization. I will now address this question and, in that context, seek to answer the question of whether it is justifiable to continue supporting the promotion of their own languages abroad by countries such as Germany and Japan.


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4. The problems for language communities like those of German and Japanese of having a single language for communication worldwide and of limiting foreign language studies to a single language (English)

There is obviously resistance to the realization of this vision. This resis-tance must be linked to the disadvantages that those who resist fear will occur if the vision is realized. It seems clear that we have to examine those who resist if we hope to find reasons for the continued promotion of lan-guages abroad other than English. One more specific question is that of the legitimacy of such policy.

Let us first identify the subjects for whom the realization of that vision would have distinct disadvantages. The projected scenario of just one lan-guage for world communication and as the only foreign language learnt serves to simplify the argument. Resistance similar to that against the reali-zation of this scenario may also be assumed to exist against any further limitation (not necessarily complete elimination) of international and for-eign language functions of those languages which have fulfilled these func-tions beforehand.

Now let us identify the people or groups who would be immediately and severely affected by development along the lines of our vision. They are:

(a) the native speakers of the previous international and foreign languages, (b) the non-native speakers of the previous international and foreign lan-

guages, (c) those members of both of these groups who have specialized jobs for

which knowledge of the relevant languages represents an important part of their qualifications.

In the case of group (a) we are looking at the members or the countries of the major language communities apart from English (Group II countries listed above). They stand to lose all the nine advantages listed in Part 1. However, they would also enjoy new advantages, in particular the opportu-nity of global communication via just one language – English. They would stand on an equal footing with the small language communities with regard to their language’s international communication potential. It seems likely – given the difference in size and their previous language privileges – that they will at least initially consider this new state of affairs to be unfair, even humiliating.

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It almost seems that the major language communities (apart from the Eng-lish) want to retain their previous advantages while at the same time also benefiting from an international lingua franca. One suspects that this will not be entirely possible. To just what extent it is possible, and for how long, appears to me to be an open question. Given the universal spread of English, to what extent will other languages continue to be learned and valued as foreign languages? The countries listed in Group II seem to base the con-tinued promotion of their own language abroad on the hope that their lan-guage will continue to be studied as a foreign language. Linked to this is the additional hope that those learning their language as a foreign language will continue to ensure the following advantages for their country and its citizens:

– easier economic ties with other countries, – availability of human capital, – communicative advantages when it comes to foreign contacts, – an improved image of their own country abroad (Part 1).

How else could these countries justify the continued promotion of their languages abroad to the taxpayer?

At most, one could consider a kind of social justification which would be relevant to both interest groups mentioned above:

(b) the non-native speakers of the language, (c) those native and non-native speakers for whom knowledge of the lan-

guage represents an important part of their professional qualifications.

The specific qualification of the latter will be devalued if, and insofar as, the knowledge of other languages becomes superfluous due to the wide-spread knowledge of English. Obviously, such a development would be a threat to the livelihood of members of the professional group (c), especially of teachers of German as a foreign language. It is hardly surprising that teachers and lecturers of foreign languages other than English everywhere are among those whose warnings against an English-only scenario are the most urgent.

In the light of the generally still low standard of English around the world, considerations such as these are bound to seem exaggerated – but they are not without foundation in reality. Teachers and lecturers of many foreign languages other than English (but not all of those languages) are


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experiencing – and suffering from the effects of – trends towards our hypo-thetical scenario.

5. Are language alliances between countries with the same language interests an adequate answer?

Giving way to “natural” development would have the following conse-quences for Germany and Japan, among others:

– loss of the nine advantages of successful language promotion listed in Part 1, for example, the special ties formed by language learners with the countries in which the language is spoken;

– socioeconomic decline of members of certain professions (job loss/devaluation of the qualifications of thousands of language teachers – although plans could be made to soothe the effects).

Is the promotion of a country’s language abroad a serious alternative to this? This is surely only the case if it achieves its intended aim. I will as-sume for the moment that this is possible

– at least to a certain extent. However, as I have pointed out, there is a considerable lack of research into the matter.

The intended aim is of course more likely to be achieved in cases where language promotion is mutual: to cite the example once more – if the Ger-man language in Japan is not only promoted by Germany, but by Japan as well, and Germany promotes Japanese in Germany. The promotion of lan-guages abroad would be even more successful if several or even all of the countries in Group II (cf. Part 2) were to cooperate in this way.

This would amount to an alliance of language communities standing against the spread of English – insofar as such spread was harmful to the international standing of their own languages. Rainer E. Hamel (2003) re-gards the language policy of Mercosur/Mercosul (in Latin America) in the light of such efforts; a similar motivation could be assumed for some as-pects of the language policy of the EU (Ammon 2005: 204–206). The in-ternational cooperation in the promotion of foreign languages abroad which already exists today, especially the cooperation between language institutes,

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is of a different kind. The Goethe Institute cooperates no differently with the Alliance française or the Japan Foundation than it does with the British Council. By contrast, in the case of language alliances based on similar interests, true partnership would only be possible between the first two – although the usual civilized relationship which includes matters such as the sharing of rent expenses for jointly-used premises would of course not be inconceivable in the case of the British Council.

The idea of language alliances between countries in Group II raises a large number of questions, only a selection of which I can deal with here. A discussion of them could shed light not only on the problems of such lan-guage alliances but also on the general purpose and meaning of promoting languages abroad. I am aware that some of these questions are so complex that they could lead to uncontrolled speculation. Here are, nevertheless, several of these questions:

(i) Language alliances among countries in Group II would – if they were to achieve their aim – be a particular burden for Group III countries, because they would continue to be forced to make excessive expendi-ture for language learning and for international communication. Does it make sense to keep account of the expenditure by Group II countries in promoting their own languages abroad as a form of compensation for this, as it in effect lowers the costs of learning and implementing the re-spective languages (cheaper language lessons, scholarships, interpreter services etc.)? Would this legitimize alliances between Group II coun-tries and their corresponding language promotion vis-à-vis Group III countries, or would these alliances amount to an unfair enforcement of vested interests? Would the alternative to such language alliances – un-controlled language spread (of English) – be more in line with the lan-guage interests of human beings worldwide?

(ii) These language alliances would raise the efficiency of the involved countries’ promotion of language abroad (if it were effective). Would that improve the legitimacy of promoting their own languages abroad vis-à-vis the countries’ own citizens? The legitimacy of promoting their own languages abroad is rarely discussed publicly, but the controversy surrounding it resurfaces during every debate about budget cuts. And even then, legitimacy in the eyes of the domestic population does not mean legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world (cf. i, iii).

(iii) The converging interests of the countries in Groups I and III would be-come more evident by language alliances in Group II, and so would


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their divergence from the interests of the countries in Group II. Could this clarification of converging and diverging language interests ulti-mately make it easier to reach fair compromises?

(iv) Are such language alliances futile from the very start, given the compe-tition between the countries in Group II themselves? Or would the end to such competition, or at least its reduction, hinder the continuing de-velopment of the world’s language situation in a way that would ulti-mately be detrimental to the majority of humanity?

(v) Are such language alliances not pointless, even dangerous, because their ramifications cannot be predicted from the limited level of our present knowledge? By contrast, could the consequences of uncon-trolled language spread (without any such alliances) be more precisely foreseen?

(vi) Which languages should ideally be part of the foreign language curric-ula of the countries involved in these language alliances? It seems clear that, on the one hand, English should not be the only foreign language to be studied and that, on the other hand, English would be too impor-tant to be disregarded. The answer would appear to be a line-up in which English is compulsory, with a bundle of languages from the other Group II countries as electives – composed and weighted accord-ing to region, need, and demand (mostly or generally two foreign lan-guages in schools). Would such a combination be compatible with the complex interests and needs of all those involved? How could the overwhelming priority of English be reduced as it tends to devalue knowledge of all other languages, as is largely the case today? And how could one ensure a level of knowledge of the second foreign lan-guage which would permit it to be used in practice? Or would knowl-edge of the second foreign language below that level still be considered in line with the purpose of the language alliances and the interests of the language communities involved?

(vii) What other advantageous or disadvantageous effects would such lan-guage alliances have? One of the advantages could be the increased awareness of the discrepancy between learning a foreign language on the one hand and actual language skills on the other. This discrepancy is obvious, for instance, in Japan, through the disparity between the large number of people who learn German and the lack of actual lan-guage skills required to match demand. It is not unusual for Germans and Japanese to make do in English for mutual communication due to a lack of German-Japanese interpreters (Aizawa 1996: 167). Nor is it im-

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possible that German companies are less willing to recognize the knowledge of German as a professional qualification than would ulti-mately be beneficial to them (Aizawa 1996: 166; Coulmas 1994). Would German companies not do better if they consistently recognized German skills, and Japanese companies if they recognized Japanese skills, as a professional qualification? And could the discussion about possible language alliances at least serve to raise the awareness of insti-tutions and individuals of language questions and thereby contribute to finding more balanced solutions?

References

Aizawa, Keiichi 1996 Zur institutionellen Reform des Deutschunterrichts an den ja-

panischen Hochschulen. In Deutsch in Japan. Interkulturalität und Skepsis zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft, Gernot Gad et al. (eds.), 165–170. Bonn: DAAD.

1983 Album von Dokkyo. Für 100 jährige Geschichte des Dokkyo Schul-wesens 1883–1983. Soka: Verlag der Universität Dokkyo.

Ammon, Ulrich 1989 Zur Geschichte der Sprachverbreitungspolitik der Bundesrepublik

Deutschland von den Anfängen bis 1985. Kommentierte Dokumen-tation der im Bundestag mit anschließendem Ausblick. Deutsche Sprache 17: 229–263.

1991 Die internationale Stellung der deutschen Sprache. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

1994 (ed.). Language-Spread Policy, Vol. I: Languages of Former Colo-nial Powers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 107.

2000 (ed.). Sprachförderung. Schlüssel auswärtiger Kulturpolitik. Frank-furt/Bern/Wien: Peter Lang.

2005 Some Problems of EU Language Policy and Discussion of Possible Solutions. In Atti del 4o congresso di studi dell’ Associaciazione Ital-iana di Linguistica Applicata, G. Banti, A. Marra, E. Vineis (eds.), 193–207. Perugia: Guerra.

2005 sh -reng (EU) ni okeru gengoseisaku – doitsugo no gengoseisaku o ch shin ni [Language policy in the EU, with a focus on German language policy]. In Doitsugo ga orinasu shakai to bunka [The soci-ety and culture held together by the German language]. Keiko


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Hamazaki, Takashi Mori, Masako Sugitani, Hiroyuki Takada (eds.), 1–28. Osaka: Kansai University Press.

1992 mit Hartmut Kleineidam (eds.). Language-Spread Policy, Vol. I: Languages of Former Colonial Powers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 95: 33–50.

Christ, Herbert 2000 Zur französischen Sprachpolitik. Der Blick nach innen und außen. In

Sprachförderung. Schlüssel auswärtiger Kulturpolitik, Ammon Ul-rich (ed.), 113–119. Frankfurt/Bern/Wien: Peter Lang.

Cooper, Robert L. 1989 Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. Coulmas, Florian

1987 The Surge of Japanese. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 80: 115–131.

1995 Deutsch in japanischen Niederlassungen deutscher Firmen. In Die deutsche Sprache in Japan. Verwendung und Studium, Ulrich Am-mon (ed.), 71–82. Munich: Iudicium.

2005 Sociolinguistics. The Study of Speakers’ Choices. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Graddol, David 1997 The Future of English? London: The British Council.

Hamel, Rainer Enrique 2003 Regional Blocs as a Barrier against English Hegemony? The Lan-

guage Policy of Mercosur in South America. In Languages in a Globalising World, Jacques Maurais, Michael A. Morris (eds.), 111–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hirataka, Fumiya 1992 Language-spread policy of Japan. In Language-Spread Policy, Vol.

I: Languages of Former Colonial Powers, Ulrich Ammon, Hartmut Kleineidam, (eds.) International Journal of the Sociology of Lan-guage 95: 93–108.

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Literatur 108: 1–11. Omura, Jintaro

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Phillipson, Robert 2000 Angelsächsische Sprachförderungspolitik. In Sprachförderung.

Schlüssel auswärtiger Kulturpolitik, Ulrich Ammon (ed.), 121–133. Frankfurt/Bern/Wien: Peter Lang.

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dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Frankfurt: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommu-nikation.

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Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Vol. I. 365–370. Ber-lin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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kung auf das Fremdsprachenstudium in Japan. In Die deutsche Sprache in Japan. Verwendung und Studium, Ulrich Ammon (ed.), 259–274. Munich: Iudicium.

Japanese and German language education in the UK: problems, parallels, and prospects

Tessa Carroll

1. Introduction

The study of Japanese and German in the UK has very different roots and histories for each language, but recent years have seen an alarming parallel develop, as university departments specialising in both languages have been cut dramatically or closed completely. My interest in this topic is both professional and personal, as a former student of German and French and as a former teacher of Japanese in a department that was closed in summer 2005 (Stirling University). Languages generally are suffering from a de-cline in popularity at both school and university level in the UK, with only Spanish of the more widely taught languages remaining stable or enjoying growth at both levels, and with Chinese growing in popularity at university level (CILT 2004; Joy 2005). This overall downward trend has caused much concern among the foreign language teaching community and there has been much lobbying of government, but the effectiveness of attempts to reverse the trend will only show their effectiveness in future years.

Against the background of the current situation in the supply and de-mand for languages in UK education, this paper outlines the historical pro-files of German and Japanese in the UK education system, before exploring some of the reasons behind the recent cuts in provision and looking at pros-pects for the future. Although the main focus is on higher education, trends in language study at school level will also be discussed, since the two sec-tors are interdependent.

2. Languages in UK higher education: the current paradox

A quotation from a recent report summarises the current situation in lan-guages in higher education in the UK:

“At university, students are crowding into language classes accompanying degrees in other disciplines, and into voluntary language study outside their degree programme, while at the same time language departments are strug-

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gling to recruit, and entire departments are closing.” (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 2).

There is thus an apparent paradox prevailing across the UK, with specialist language degrees in decline alongside a growing demand for language classes supplementary to students’ main subjects. The following statistics from Scotland illustrate this contrast well:

“The total number of students studying languages has increased by around 15 per cent over the past seven years, to around 8,000. However, the in-crease is accounted for entirely by a tripling of the numbers taking sub-degree courses, while the number taking a first degree in languages has ac-tually fallen by 8 per cent over the period.” (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 12)

Before looking at the specific cases of Japanese and German, it is important to consider the two sides of this paradox.

2.1. The decline in specialist language degrees

The decline of specialist language degrees is a relatively recent phenome-non, appearing only in the last decade or so: applications have been falling by approximately 4.5 per cent per year since the boom years of the early 1990s (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 10–11). Putting this in the context of the range of degrees available highlights the extent to which languages have shrunk: “Language degrees have lost nearly a third of their market share and now contain around 2.4 per cent of all undergraduates.” (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 10–11). It must also be noted that this fall in numbers is against the background of rapidly expanding numbers of students in higher education due to UK government policy since the late 1990s: “the total number of Home higher education students in the UK increased by almost two-thirds between 1991/92 and 2003/04, the highest percentage increase being in postgraduate students” (Department for Education and Skills 2005a). Reasons for the drop in demand will be discussed later.

The shrinking pool of specialist language students, combined with other factors relating to the organisation and funding of higher education, which I will examine towards the end of this paper, has a range of consequences.

Departments or sections offering specific languages or a range of lan-guages are being closed, dramatically cut, or amalgamated with other de-

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partments. A survey of 30 UK universities in 2001 illustrated the threat to languages: 77 per cent (23) of the institutions reported that one or more of the languages and/or courses they offered prior to 1999 had already been cut or were likely to be cut after September 2001. The languages that had been cut included Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Polish and Hungarian, and courses which had been closed included joint degrees in European Studies and a language, and single honours degrees in French. Almost all (93 per cent) of the universities reported major staffing reductions since September 1999: “At a conservative estimate on these figures, there are approximately 130 posts in languages which have gone since 1999 within this small sam-ple of universities. Two days after the survey was completed, it was re-ported that one of the respondent institutions was now to make the whole of its ML department redundant” (University Council of Modern Languages 2001).

These closures mean that the range of languages offered at university level in different regions of the UK is becoming restricted. For example, only four universities in Scotland now offer full degree provision in five or more languages (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 24). Choice thus becomes more restricted, and students who can only study locally because of financial pressures – increasingly the case since the replacement of grants by loans and the introduction of tuition fees since the late 1990s (MacLeod 2004a) – may not be able to study particular languages. In England, the closure of German and Russian at Keele University has deprived students in North Staffordshire wanting to study locally of the chance to study these lan-guages (MacLeod 2004b). The situation of Japanese in Scotland is a par-ticularly striking example of this. Until the academic year 2004–05, Stirling University ran single and combined honours degrees in French, German, Spanish and Japanese. The decision to phase out Japanese was taken in autumn 2001 with the final cohort of students graduating in summer 2005; Japanese is now offered to degree level in only one university in Scotland, Edinburgh. Students who are not accepted by Edinburgh or want to study aspects of Japanese studies or degree combinations not offered there must leave Scotland to do so. German has followed the fate of Japanese at Stir-ling: after a couple of years of being offered only at subsidiary level, its complete closure was announced in autumn 2005. Nevertheless, German still has a good geographical spread in Scotland, being offered to degree level at six institutions: Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Glasgow, Strathclyde and St Andrews.

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There is increased competition for the smaller numbers of specialist lan-guage students, with some departments or sections hoping to survive through the closure of others. Individual universities are autonomous and make their own decisions on which languages to retain or close: while Japanese and German have been particular targets, there are some interest-ing differences in strategy. For example, in 2005, Oxford Brookes Univer-sity decided to close Spanish, German and Italian, while retaining French and Japanese (MacLeod 2005). It is likely that the outcry over closures of Japanese in recent years strengthened the case for its retention here (Hahn 2005).

2.2. Language provision for all

Increasingly, language departments offering full degrees are being supple-mented or replaced by language centres providing supplementary teaching for students majoring in other disciplines. These unitary institution-wide language programmes started to be established during the 1990s to meet demand for language teaching from non-specialist students, which had been growing since the 1960s but which had previously been dealt with on a more ad hoc basis. Bickerton (2002) provides a good overview of this type of language provision. Kelly and Holmes (2003: 26) sum up its advantages and problems: “At its best [this approach] enables a well-focused and pro-fessional language teaching programme to be delivered ... At its worst it provides a cheap and precarious service. ... Non-degree programmes are often provided on marginal funding and sometimes rely on poorly trained staff”. Moreover, the staff teaching in language centres usually have lower status and different employment conditions from other academics, as lan-guage teaching is not generally seen as an academic subject (Association of Japanese Teachers in Europe 2004). This approach to foreign languages appears to focus on the economic benefits for trade and business, on pro-ducing people with technical language skills but little wider understanding of the relevant cultures and societies – rather like English as an interna-tional language.

The shift from specialist degrees to supplementary language courses has different implications for German and for Japanese. The most obvious dif-ference is the length of time it takes for native English speakers to acquire any degree of fluency in the respective languages: while it is perfectly pos-sible to reach a reasonable level in German and other European languages


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with such courses, this is certainly not the case for Japanese. Fifteen years ago, Kirsten Refsing (1991) presented a cogent case for highly intensive courses in Japanese language; it is deeply worrying to see the trend going in the opposite direction. Staffing also differs in the two languages. The sup-ply of trained native and non-native speakers of German is larger and more stable than for Japanese: as EU citizens, native German speakers from Germany and Austria have the automatic right to live and work in the UK. In contrast, strict visa restrictions limit the number of years that Japanese nationals can live in the UK; hence the traditional preponderance of Japa-nese wives of British citizens in the Japanese language teaching force. The number of trained and qualified native Japanese teachers has increased in recent years, as qualifications in teaching Japanese as a foreign language have become more widely available. Nevertheless, the visa restrictions result in a high turnover rate and a lack of continuity.

I will now go on to look at some of the reasons behind the fall in interest in full language degrees and the rise of “add-on” courses.

3. Reasons for the decline in demand for specialist language degrees

Why students fail to pursue language degrees is closely linked to their ex-perience in schools, but can also be attributed more generally to a “climate of negativity” towards language-learning in the UK (Watts 2003: v). UK students are now paying tuition fees (deferred until after graduation) and living on loans rather than grants, and most have to work part-time to sup-port themselves. Languages require consistent and time-consuming study and other subjects are often seen as easier options. Many students may fail to see the vocational value of specialist language degrees, although they can see the advantage of some linguistic capability as an “add-on” to an-other subject, hence the growth in such provision.

3.1. Languages at school level

“The demand for A level1 languages has been declining steadily from the high point it reached ten years ago [1992/93] in the enthusiasm for the European Single market”. (Kelly and Homes 2003: 8). Languages have the reputation of being relatively difficult subjects (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 22). Students aiming for good grades in their examinations often choose

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subjects where it is considered easier to obtain higher grades and thus more points for university entrance. For example, Watts and Pickering (2004: ii) found that 69 per cent of the students who had given up German after AS2

level believed that taking German at A2 level would have lowered their overall grades for university entrance. Moreover, languages are not widely perceived as useful or vocational (CILT 2004). In a survey by Hughes et al(2004) of pupils about their decisions whether to continue studying a lan-guage after GCSE level, 28 per cent cited the relevance or lack of relevance to their future career plans. The researchers argue that this is a rationalisa-tion for decisions made on the basis of other factors, such as lack of enjoy-ment: only 40 per cent of students surveyed liked the teaching methods used in languages up to GCSE (Hughes et al 2004). They also found that only 23 per cent of the pupils surveyed agreed that, “As English is a world language, there is little point in learning another”, and most of these were pupils who saw themselves as not good at learning languages. However, it is certainly true that there is a widespread perception in society that “for-eigners all speak English anyway” (Robb 2004).

There is a large gap between courses and examinations taken at sixteen (Standard Grade in Scotland or GCSE in the rest of the UK) and at seven-teen or eighteen (Highers in Scotland or AS/A2 levels in the rest of the UK). McPake et al (1999: 5) found that teachers felt that students were discour-aged by the shift from Standard Grade, which focuses on oral communica-tion, to a greater emphasis on reading, writing and grammar at Higher Grade. Many students find this leap difficult and avoid making it. Watts and Pickering (2004: ii) found this to be a significant factor in relation to German, and the problem exists with languages in general (Hughes et al:2004).

Other factors relating to the curriculum and staffing have an impact too. The increasing range of subjects offered in schools has brought more com-petition for languages and more timetable clashes (CILT 2004; McPake etal 1999). There is a shortage of language teachers at secondary level and relatively few teachers at primary level have been trained to teach lan-guages (Department for Education and Skills 2002). A vicious circle is thus established, with shortages in teachers leading to cuts in provision, and more shortages of students and potential teachers (Watts 2004: 1).

The discussion above relates to the demand for languages in general at school level, but the fall in students at this level naturally has an impact on the demand at university level.


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4. German and Japanese: past and present

The study of German and Japanese in the UK has developed quite differ-ently for each language; analysing the specific historical and current cir-cumstances of each is essential to understanding the problems that face them as university subjects today.

Modern European languages became established as autonomous disci-plines in universities in the late nineteenth century. Although German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian have also been taught, French has tradition-ally been by far the most popular foreign language at all levels of education in the UK: “an accident of history and geographical proximity” (Phipps and Gonzalez 2004: 23). For example, Bello (1989: 5) notes that French was the first foreign language in the overwhelming majority of schools until the 1970s.

4.1. German

German has a long history of being taught in the UK. It was valued as a foreign language before World War I because of the influence of German culture and of academic and scientific research (Bello 1989: 9), just as it was historically influential in Japan. Both World Wars had a negative effect in terms of the image of Germany and hence its language. German lost popularity after World War I, and again immediately after World War II. However, during the Cold War when Germany was divided, the language was perceived as more strategically important. After the UK joined the European Union in 1973, German became more popular, as one of the ma-jor EU languages.

More recently, there has been a sharp decline in its popularity, leading to falling university student numbers and departmental closures; for exam-ple, Keele University decided in 2004 to close its German department (MacLeod 2004b) and Stirling followed suit in 2005. Other institutions have reduced provision to subsidiary level (for example, the University of East Anglia), or specialist degrees have been replaced by provision in lan-guage centres. Very few independent departments remain; the general trend is towards mergers in broader language departments. This brings both ad-vantages and disadvantages. For example, collaboration and broader in-sights into the respective cultures associated with the languages involved may develop in integrated departments, and bigger departments may enjoy

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a stronger position in relation to the whole institution. Less positively, there may be a loss of autonomy and identity, and more competition for re-sources.

The history of the German language in UK education is thus character-ised by ups and downs and a recent fairly steep decline.

4.2. Japanese

The development of Japanese in the UK has been very different:

“Until the Second World War, Japanese studies were the province of gifted amateurs and some individual professional scholars. Students were few in number but the year 1942 saw an exponential increase as a result of war-time courses.” (Council for British Association for Japanese Studies 1981: 1).

Postwar, Japanese Studies centres were established at the School of Orien-tal and African Studies in London and at Sheffield University. Added to Oxford and Cambridge, this resulted in four main centres, plus research on Japanese economics at the London School of Economics (Council for Brit-ish Association for Japanese Studies 1981). However, student numbers were still very small: in the late 1970s to early 1980s, the UK produced fewer than twenty graduates in Japanese each year.

In 1986, the Parker Report recommended expansion of provision in Japanese, resulting in the establishment of new centres and expansion to full degree programmes at institutions where some Japanese teaching al-ready existed, such as Stirling. This brought about in a large increase in the number of graduates during the 1990s, for example, up to fifteen each year from Stirling University alone. The number of institutions teaching Japa-nese language as part of a degree programme increased from 11 in 1986 to 27 in 1993 (UK–Japan 2000 Group 1993: 1). In 2002, the language was offered at 49 institutions (Japan Today, 12 August 2004). However, the paradox outlined at the beginning of this paper applies here. Of the 12 uni-versities offering Japanese at single or joint honours level in 1993, at least four have since closed or are being phased out (Universities of Stirling, Durham, and Ulster, and King Alfred’s College of Higher Education in Winchester), and at least one other, Cardiff, has restricted its range of de-grees. Others (for example, Aston and Lancaster) have withdrawn Japanese


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at subsidiary level. Postgraduate courses have also been closed, for exam-ple at Essex. The number of institutions offering Japanese to degree level has dropped from eight to six in the last few years, and fifteen offer Japa-nese at subsidiary or degree level. Japanese provision is being moved to language centres, for example, at Durham, with the problems outlined above (Association of Japanese Teachers in Europe 2004). Overall, the subject is competing with Chinese for students and financial support, and is being promoted by the government throughout the UK (Jackson 2005; Learning and Teaching Scotland 2005).

In contrast to these closures, there has been steady growth in the num-bers of students of Japanese at university, with numbers increasing in 2004, although it is unclear whether this expansion is temporary or part of a big-ger trend (Association of Japanese Teachers in Europe 2004). Most of the expansion in higher education is in subsidiary-level and supplementary language courses. However, even for specialist study, increasing numbers are evident. An informal survey by university staff in Japanese studies in 2005 showed, for example, that applications for Japanese language had increased by 300 per cent between 2001 and 2004 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, with similar rises at other institu-tions.

One factor contributing to growing student numbers is the expansion of Japanese in schools. Until the influx of Japanese companies into the UK in the mid-1980s, Japanese was taught in only a handful of schools by a few dedicated enthusiasts. Japanese pupils entering UK schools gave an impe-tus for learning about the country and the language, and made it seem less exotic. The growing numbers of returnees from the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme also provide some potential teachers of Japanese – in 2003 around 600 graduates from the UK were selected to participate in the programme (Embassy of Japan, no date). Today, when most other lan-guages are in decline in UK schools, Japanese is seeing a resurgence of interest (Convery 2004). According to estimates from the Japan Foundation London Language Centre, over 8,000 pupils were studying Japanese to some level at school in 2004 (Hollingworth 2004). In the same year Japa-nese was being taught at 42 primary schools (Association of Japanese Teachers in Europe 2004). The provision of teacher training for Japanese by Nottingham University since 1991 has been a major factor in the expan-sion of provision at school level (Convery 2004).

There is thus a contrast between the departmental closures and a steady and increasing demand from students. Expansion at school level will pro-

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duce a large pool of potential students at higher education levels, and there is concern amongst academics in Japanese studies as to whether the re-duced number of departments, and the resulting limitation of range of spe-cialists, will be able to meet the needs of students wishing to pursue their study of the language at university level (Hollingworth 2004).

4.3. Students’ attitudes towards German and Japanese

If we move on now to look at students’ attitudes towards these two lan-guages, we see significant differences that go some way to explaining the respective trends in their study.

4.3.1. German

German is perceived as a difficult language, particularly in terms of gram-mar: Watts and Pickering (2004: ii) found that 64 per cent of students who had taken German at AS level thought the grammar was difficult. This con-trasts with the opinion of many language teachers and some evidence that it is easier for English speakers than French in many ways, for example, the pronunciation, and the relatively phonetic spelling system (Scottish Execu-tive 2001). Recent research in Scotland found that pupils in the final year of primary school and second year of secondary school performed better in German than in French (Watts and Pickering 2004).

Germany also has an image problem – it is not “cool”. Associations with WWII persist in media and in school history lessons, as is frequently highlighted by the current German ambassador to the UK. “60 per cent of students each year have their last history lesson at the age of 14 – those remaining focus on Hitler and Nazi Germany at GCSE and A level” (Matussek 2004). It is worth quoting his perceptions of the image of Ger-many in the UK at length:

“When I first worked in London in the 70s I was confronted almost every day with the darkest chapter of Germany’s past. There was a lot written about it in the media and on television – Dad’s Army and Colditz and so on – and some of it was unpleasant. But there was no widespread hostility to Germany. A lot of British people went to Germany for work or with their families and this served as a reality check against the more extreme ele-


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ments of the media. But these days people are not spending as much time in Germany. The Rhine Army has almost gone and holidaymakers prefer Spain and Portugal for the sun and the seaside. Fewer British people spend time in Germany these days. And so people are not seeing things for them-selves. The younger generations are growing up with little or no real experi-ence of modern day Germany.” (Matussek 2004).

As Matussek notes, Germany is not a popular holiday destination amongst the British. Spain, on the other hand, is, particularly since the rise of cheap package holidays in the 1970s. Students develop positive associations be-tween sunshine and a holiday mood and the language, and their experience of the country makes it easier to envisage themselves living and working there in the future. And it is not just Spain that is attractive: many students spend their gap year between school and university in South America. Nor should the influence of Spain and Latin America in popular culture – salsa, tapas, football, Jennifer Lopez – be underestimated as a factor in the grow-ing popularity of Spanish.

Although still powerful within the EU, the accession of Eastern Euro-pean and Baltic states has diluted its influence, and German is now only one of many EU languages. It is not seen as particularly useful (Watts and Pickering 2004), even though it may in fact be more useful than English or French in Eastern Europe and former Soviet countries. Indeed, as Ulrich Ammon describes elsewhere in this volume, German has been ranked as the second most important language in the world economically.

4.3.2. Japanese

According to a Japan Foundation survey, reasons for studying Japanese vary from country to country, but overall the three major reasons for study-ing Japanese were cited as “interest in Japanese culture”, “desire to com-municate using Japanese” and “interest in the Japanese language” (Japan Foundation 2005). My own observations of students’ motivations through-out my period teaching Japanese at Stirling University (1988–2005) was that the late 1980s to early 1990s was peak of interest in learning Japanese for instrumental purposes3 – to get a good job. This coincided with the lat-ter part of Japan’s economic boom and the expansion of Japanese compa-nies such as Honda, Nissan, and Canon into setting up factories in the UK. The business links of 1980s through factories in various parts of UK have

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raised the profile of Japan and Japanese, even if many of the factories have now gone.

Since the bursting of the bubble economy, there has been a noticeable shift towards more students learning Japanese because of their interest in some aspect of the culture – often martial arts, manga, or anime (see the online discussion in Ito 2005 on the popularity of anime among students of Japanese). Today, Japan is definitely “cool” – its fashion, manga, anime,films and food have become familiar in Britain and influence popular cul-ture worldwide.

Japanese is increasingly offered in schools. The language, including the script, is seen as unusual and is often attractive to students who have not enjoyed or done well in French or other European languages as well as to those who are good at or who enjoy languages in general. Its novelty value is an advantage at both school and university levels.

We have seen that the numbers of students studying German at univer-sity are falling, while those studying Japanese are steady or rising. Why then are departments or sections in both languages being closed or drasti-cally cut?

5. Changes in higher education

The answer lies in changes in the structure and ethos of higher education institutions that are inevitably linked to the broader political and economic context. Higher education in the UK has been increasingly subject to a market ethos since the 1980s (for example, Evans 2004). Courses have to make money (or at least not lose it). Language teaching is intensive, requir-ing small groups, high numbers of contact hours, and frequent feedback. In England, some allowance is made for this, with languages being funded at a higher level than other humanities subjects such as history or English litera-ture, but in Scotland, they are funded at the same level as the other humani-ties (Millan 2003). Many of those involved in teaching Japanese argue that it suffers even more because it takes more time to learn than European lan-guages but is not given more funding (Hollingworth 2004).

In my experience, there is a lack of understanding on the part of univer-sity management of what is involved in studying and teaching languages. Languages are frequently seen as a technical skill, capable of being taught by any native speaker, and language teaching is undervalued (for example, Refsing 1991). Even within the academic languages and area studies com-


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munity, I would argue that there is insufficient understanding of the spe-cific issues relating to learning and teaching Japanese (or, for that matter, other so-called “exotic” languages) compared to European languages.

A major factor in the increased competitiveness (in the “market” sense) that now characterises UK higher education is the Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs), peer-reviewed assessments of research quality that are then used to determine departmental funding. These were introduced in the UK in 1992 and subsequently carried out in 1996 and 2001; the next is due in 2008. As research funding to language departments or sections with the lowest grades has been cut over the successive rounds of the RAE, the fi-nancial pressures on those with falling student numbers have been exacer-bated. Rowlett (2003) highlights the serious consequences of these research funding cuts on language provision.

The rapid rise and subsequent decline of Japanese in particular is di-rectly linked to the fortunes of the Japanese economy. Many UK universi-ties were happy to start offering Japanese in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Japanese economy was booming and funding from Japanese gov-ernment, charitable foundations (such as the Japan Foundation, Daiwa An-glo–Japanese Foundation, and the Sasakawa Foundation) and industry was easy to come by. Faced with having to meet costs themselves, some have retreated to cheaper options or shifted their sights to countries with more funding and economic potential, particularly China.

6. Situation in other countries

The trends in language study in the UK have some parallels in other coun-tries. In France, for example, there has been a dramatic decline in tradi-tional literature and civilisation language degrees (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 18). Japanese is expanding in Germany, with twenty schools in Germany now teaching Japanese as a normal subject. In the academic year 2002–03 over 2,500 students were taking Japanese as a main subject in German uni-versities. Numbers of students are increasing, with twenty-two institutions offering Japanese to main or subsidiary level and a further forty offering Japanese to a lower level. As in the UK, manga, anime, and Japanese game shows have enjoyed popularity, resulting in increasing numbers of students, particularly at younger ages. Some university departments are nevertheless threatened by rationalisation because of financial pressures and by univer-sity reforms. (Association of Japanese Teachers in Europe 2004). In Aus-

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tralia, Japanese and Chinese continue to grow, while traditionally studied European languages such as German, French and Italian are being aban-doned (Kelly and Holmes 2003: 13).

7. Future prospects

The government departments responsible for education in the various na-tions of the UK have started to make efforts to reverse the decline in the study of languages at school level. In England, moves such as the Early Language Learning Initiative, which will entitle primary school pupils to foreign language learning from 2009 (National Advisory Centre on Early Language Learning 2005), may boost demand long-term. This strategy focuses on encouraging language learning at an early age, based on evi-dence that children are then more likely to continue in later years. Specialist language schools have been established and their numbers are to be ex-panded to 400 by 2010 (see Department of Education and Skills 2005 for more details of these and other initiatives). Whether these can counteract the negative effect of dropping the foreign language requirement after 14 years of age in 2004 remains to be seen. Similar policies are being intro-duced in Scotland (HM Inspectorate of Education 2005) and Wales (Welsh Assembly Government 2002, 2004).

A particular issue of concern is the contrast between state and independ-ent schools. “Less than one third of state schools now require pupils to learn a language up to 16, whereas the vast majority of independent schools regard a foreign language as essential” (CILT 2004). Languages are still more valued and widely taught in the latter, which raises issues of elitism and access: “… languages have the second lowest percentage of students from working-class backgrounds (the lowest percentage being medicine). Nearly one in 10 of all undergraduates are the offspring of unskilled or partly skilled workers, but in languages it is fewer than one in 15”. (Beckett 2002).

A recent summary of trends in acceptances for modern foreign lan-guages at UK universities including data for languages at Single, Joint, Major and Minor level, shows a mixed picture. Against a background of an increase of 33 per cent in higher education student acceptances, there are overall increases in accepted applicants for Spanish, Chinese, Modern Mid-dle Eastern and African studies; overall decreases for French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and Asian studies; and fluctuations for Portuguese,


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Japanese, Russian and Eastern European languages. In more recent years, language student acceptances have started to even out and in some cases slowly pick up: “2004 entry saw increases, compared with 2003, in accep-tances for all languages except four (German, Scandinavian, Russian and African studies, with these increases mostly occurring in single and joint honours courses, that is, specialist language degrees; and early data for 2005 entry showed that numbers may still be growing. Nevertheless, “large increases are necessary to get back up to 1996 levels” (Joy 2005).

Promoting language study as a boost to employment prospects may be one way of encouraging such increases. For those graduating in modern languages in 2003, the unemployment rate was 5.9 per cent — less than half of that of graduates in computer science (12.4 per cent) and below the overall average of 7.1 per cent (CILT 2005). Language graduates develop generic abilities that appeal to employers in addition to specific linguistic ones:

“Their study of language makes them good communicators in their native language as well as the foreign ones. This is the generic ability most highly rated by employers. The practical experience of the year they spend abroad, develops a whole basket of abilities valued by employers: autonomy, flexi-bility, personal organisation, knowledge of other cultures, maturity. This mix of generic abilities, together with specific foreign language knowledge are developed by unique elements in language degrees. And that is what gives the linguists the edge in selling themselves to employers, in competi-tion with others” (Marshall no date).

Regarding Japanese, the particularly high-profile decision in 2002 of Dur-ham University to close its East Asian Studies department led the UK–Japan 21st Century Group (consisting of academics, politicians and offi-cials) to lobby the Department of Education and Skills to demand a review by the Higher Education Funding Council for England of its policy on “mi-nority” and other languages and other threatened subjects, such as sciences (Hollingworth 2004). In June 2005, the HEFCE ruled out government in-tervention to subside these areas, deciding to leave developments to market forces and rationalisation. It argued that one or two national centres of ex-cellence in so-called “minority” languages might be better than spreading resources across a larger number of smaller centres (Higher Education Funding Council for England (2005). Although there is some justification for concentrating scarce resources, there are many negative aspects of this

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decision. The expertise of the smaller department may be lost, if staff leave the country or the profession; students have a more restricted choice of where to study, and when increasing numbers of students are remaining in the parental home throughout university study for financial reasons, some may be deprived altogether of the opportunity to study Japanese to degree level. The question of what constitutes a “minority” language is also raised: can the language of what is still a major world economy really be consid-ered a minority one? And surely the cuts in full degree provision are them-selves responsible for maintaining this minority status?

8. Conclusion

On the surface, German and Japanese share the problem faced by languages in general in the UK, but closer examination shows significant differences and indicates that different strategies may be needed to ensure their health in UK higher education.

The shift from specialist language degrees to supplementary/subsidiary classes looks set to continue. The growth in supplementary courses is a positive development, allowing those who are interested in developing their linguistic skills as an adjunct to another subject to do so and catering for those who do not wish to devote themselves full-time to such study. Both specialist and supplementary level language learning are vital, but the pros-pect of the latter taking over from the former is a worrying one. It may be particularly problematic for Japanese, given the amount of study time needed to reach any level of competence in the language. The shift seems to indicate a general move away from studying languages for their intrinsic appeal, as a means of learning about the cultures in which they function, towards more instrumental motivations. German, on the other hand, does not appear to have either much intrinsic or instrumental appeal to potential specialist students, but its appeal as a supplementary subject may be more instrumental.

Will Japanese return to being a minority exotic language? I think not, given the influence of Japanese popular culture and the continuing impor-tance of the Japanese economy, which now appears to be improving. The expansion of teaching in schools means that the idea of learning Japanese, while still unusual, is nowhere near as exotic or extraordinary as it seemed a few decades ago.


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Will German become a minority language? Much depends on what hap-pens in schools in the future, and on whether Germany can improve its image. A campaign aiming to do that was launched in 2002 (Robb 2004). Perhaps promoting German as a language useful in many other – often unexpected – countries is one way to increase its perceived (instrumental) value. As the German ambassador noted in a speech in December 2005, “Germany is the number one trading partner for almost all the European countries and many countries outside Europe. A person who speaks Ger-man will be able to communicate better with business partners in the world’s third-biggest economy and one of the leading exporting countries.” (Matussek 2005). Language graduates overall and German graduates in particular have high rates of employment (Marshall no date). In a 1999 survey by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, graduates with a first degree in German had the second lowest rate of unemployment (2.6 per cent), and language graduates overall were seventh (4.6 per cent) of twenty categories, with the creative arts/design at the bottom (8.1 per cent) (Mar-shall no date).

The demand for and provision of German and Japanese in UK higher education are, as for other languages, subject to a wide range of interacting influences: financial, economic, cultural, political, edu-cational, and emotional. Any attempts to counteract the recent prob-lems that have been discussed in this paper need to take all of these factors into account.

Notes

1. Examinations taken in England, Wales and Northern Ireland at 18 and requi-red for university entrance.

2. Since 2000, A levels have been divided into two levels, AS, taken after one year of study, and A2, the continuation of the same subject for another year and the equivalent of the old A level (Learning and Skills Development A-gency 2005).

3. Instrumental and intrinsic motivations can of course never be truly separated, although they may co-exist in varying proportions and evolve throughout the learning process.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to colleagues in the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions and the Scottish Centre for Information on Language Teaching at Stirling Univer-sity, and in Japanese studies in other UK institutions for providing me with much of the information for this paper. My thanks also to the other participants at the symposium in Tokyo in September 2005 for their thoughtful questions and com-ments on my presentation of an earlier version of this paper.

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funding [quality-related research funding] for departments scoring 3a and 4 in the 2001 RAE: one in three research-active staff loses core funding. University Council on Modern Languages. http:// www.ucml.org.uk/key_documents.htm (accessed December 2005).

Scottish Executive 2001 Assessment of Achievement Programme: Report of the First Survey

of Modern Languages (French and German). Scottish Executive. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/education/fsml-00.asp (accessed December 2005).

UK–Japan 2000 Group 1993 Japanese Language Teaching at British Universities and Centres of

Higher Education: A Survey. University Council of Modern Languages

2001 Mapping Languages snapshot survey. http://www.ucml.org. uk/key_documents.htm (accessed December 2005).

Watts, Catherine 2003 Decline in the Take-up of Modern Languages at Degree Level. Lon-

don: Anglo–German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. http://www.agf.org.uk/pubs/pdfs/1328web.pdf (accessed December 2005).

Watts, Catherine and Pickering, Angela 2004 Cash-in or Continue? An Exploration of the Drop Out from German

Language Study between AS and A2 Level: An Anglo–German Foundation Report. London: Anglo–German Foundation. http://agf.org.uk/pubs/pdfs/1431web.pdf

Welsh Assembly Government 2002 “Languages Count” for Wales, 18 April. http://www.wales.gov.uk/

servlet/PressReleaseByDateServlet?area_code=37E752F2000942 E000000A2E00000000&document_code=3CBE8B6B0001AA06000005C300000000 (accessed December 2005).


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2004 Modern foreign languages in Wales, 2003. Statistical Bulletin 54. http://www.wales.gov.uk/keypubstatisticsforwales/content/publication/schools-teach/2004/sb54-2004/sb54-2004.htm (accessed December 2005).

Britain worried over decline in Japanese courses at universities. Japan Today, 12 August 2004. http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=feature&id= 694 (accessed August 2005).

Learning and Teaching Scotland, Scottish Executive Education Department (2005) “Scotland’s links with China” Connected Online Magazine, 14, Win-ter. http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ictineducation/connected/connected 14/specialfeature/linkswithchina.asp (accessed December 2005)

Changing economic values of German and Japanese

Fumio Inoue

Introduction: the perspective of econolinguistics

This paper is an essay on the econolinguistics of two major languages of the world today, German and Japanese. The economic value of these lan-guages will be assessed on the basis of changes in the number of foreign learners. First, the present status of German and Japanese in the world will be ascertained. The situation of German in Japan will then be considered on the basis of various statistical data. Finally, after a theoretical discussion, future prospects of the two languages will be analysed.

To begin with, let us consider the framework of this discussion, which is econolinguistics. In discussing the present status of German and Japanese, the power of English cannot be ignored. English exercises a strong influ-ence at the lexical level of loanwords all over the world (Miyazima 1992), as well as with regard to “corpus (language) planning”, to use a sociolin-guistic term, but these aspects will be ignored in this paper.1 Attention will be focussed on the aspect of “status planning”, that is, the social use of languages, although, at this point, increases and decreases in the number of native speakers will be ignored.

German and Japanese are not in danger of extinction. They are national languages and official languages; moreover, they are two of the most popu-lar languages studied as foreign languages in higher education. In other words, they are languages with a high market value. The domains or situa-tions of usage are still safe and stable, although some domains are being invaded by English (e.g., technical terms in science and commercial terms in economy and commerce). Here we will concentrate on domains outside the core areas of the two languages, that is, foreign language education for second language learners.

To state the conclusions of this paper first, in the world today, fo-reign language education is governed by economic principles. The study of exotic languages by aristocratic dilettantes, as in the 18th or 19th centuries, has become rare, and learning modern languages in order to acquire knowledge of advanced societies became prevalent in the 20th century, with a heavy concentration on English by the end of the century. In this sense, German and Japanese have been in a

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similar situation for nearly a century. Thus common criteria can be applied when constructing projections about the future development of the two languages. Although English is steadily expanding its lead over all other languages, the market value of German and Japanese is not depreciating, because, in future, developing countries will produ-ce more language demand in the course of internationalization.

1. The status of German and Japanese in the world today

First, the status of German and Japanese in the world of today in terms of popularity will be ascertained. This is done on the basis of data gathered in a large-scale international survey on Japanese, conducted in the 1990s by the National Institute for Japanese Language, Tokyo (Shin-puro Nihongo 1999). Various questions were asked in order to measure the status of lan-guages. The most appropriate question for future predictions is analysed here. That is: the language which will be essential or indispensable for in-ternational communication in the future. The results of about 1,000 samples each in 28 countries were calculated separately. Adding up the results of the 28 countries in a simple sum does not mean much, for if, for example, the percentages of Singapore and China are added and divided by 2, the weight of the Singapore responses are disproportionately large. Therefore, a graduate student at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies calculated the actual popularity of languages by multiplying the population size of survey countries by the percentages of survey results. On the basis of this survey, he drew up a similar calculation for all the countries of the world (Kigoshi 2004).

The results are shown in Figure 1. According to this estimate, the pre-diction of the future importance of languages is in the order English, Chi-nese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. English is acknowl-edged as by far the most necessary language for world communication. In Figure 1, vertical columns of the languages can be divided into the coun-tries surveyed. It is clear from the graph that the answers of Chinese re-spondents are decisive for the order of languages. Japanese received high marks partly because of the positive response in neighbouring China, with a population of 1.3 billion, while German was ranked highly by neighbouring European countries.

Thus far, we have observed the status of German and Japanese languages in the world.

Changing economic values 97

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Figure 1. What languages do you think will be essential or indispensable for inter-national communication in the future? (Kigoshi 2004)

0 1,

000

2,00

0 3,

000

4,00

0 5,

000

6,00

0

Engli

sh

Chine

se

Fren

ch

Germ

an

Japa

nese

Span

ish

Russ

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Portu

gues

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Arab

ic

Italia

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Kore

an

Othe

rs

milli

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Arge

ntina

Austr

alia

Braz

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inaEg

ypt

Fran

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rman

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ngar

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diaIn

done

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ael

Italy

Japa

nM

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lNe

therla

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Nige

riaPh

ilippin

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gapo

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Spain

Taiw

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UK USA

Vietn

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2. Three factors of the language market

Next, we will proceed to a theoretical discussion on the reasons why such ordering is given to languages in the world. The conclusion is simple. In the world today, languages have economic value (Coulmas 1992). Previously published theories (Inoue 1997, 1998, 2001a) need some revision, which can be touched upon only very briefly in this paper, however.

The factors that control the market value of languages fall into three categories, as shown in Figure 2. The three factors are (1) population size, (2) economic power of the speech community, and (3) information quantity and cultural elaboration. The first and second factors are concerned with quantity, and the third factor is concerned with quality. The size of a lan-guage territory could also be taken into account which, however, largely corresponds to the three decisive factors.

Geographical scales 3 factors

global regional perso-nal

languages Market value factors

Ch En Hind Sp Ar Po Jp

Indice de diffusion = learners / native speakers

En Jp Ge Fr Sp It Ru Ch

GDP GNP trade quantity

1 Population Quantity

2 Economical power Quantity

3 Information quantity,

Cultural level Quality

En Ch Ge Fr Sp Jp Ru / En Ch Jp Ge Sp Fr

books,Internet; personal taste

Proximity domains effect

Figure 2. Three factors of market value of languages

2.1. Population of speakers

The first factor is sufficient to explain the vast range of social status of languages in the world, the total of which is sometimes quoted as number-ing 3,000 and sometimes as many as 8,000. There are major languages with


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more than one hundred million speakers, such as Chinese, English and Japanese; on the other hand, there are minority languages with less than one hundred and sometimes just a handful of speakers. Languages taught as foreign languages in universities and language schools usually have more than ten million speakers. This kind of proportional relation between num-ber of speakers and status of language can be impressionistically repre-sented by a scattergram with the two factors on the x and y axes.

In addition to the total population of native speakers, many other indices should be taken into account to better explain the ranking of languages, as suggested, for instance, by Inoue (2001a). Second language speakers, num-bers of countries used, status in the UN, among others, all contribute to the first factor of the language market. Nowadays this is a market on a world-wide scale. However, population is not enough to explain the ranking of major languages of the world, as shown in Figure 1.

2.2. The economic power of languages

In order to understand the ranking of the first ten or one hundred most popular languages, the economic factor, too, has to be taken into account. This factor can be calculated by summing up the GDP or GNP of countries where certain languages are used as official languages, as shown in Figure 3. Since the 1970s, the economic ranking of languages according to this index has been English in first place followed by Japanese and German. In the case of German, the total of the GNP of former East and West Germany and Austria, plus one-quarter of the GDP of Switzerland, is taken as the index value. As Ammon (this volume) has pointed out, several more infor-mative indices such as, for instance, exports have been proposed, and other suggestions will likely be put forth before we arrive at the most effective index.

At the same time, we should not forget that the actual linguistic situation often does not reflect the linguistic market value directly: sometimes lan-guage choice is exercised deliberately, ignoring market principles. Meta-phorically speaking, this could be called a “planned economy of languages”. Language choice in high schools all over the world, and in primary schools nowadays in many countries, is mostly decided by central governments, as in a planned economy. Eastern Europe is a case in point. In Hungary, for example, Russian was taught as an obligatory subject, but a few years after the collapse of the Berlin wall the learners of Russian suddenly decreased.

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In the situation of a “liberal economy” various foreign languages were cho-sen, mainly neighbouring European languages such as German (which was a popular language in the past because of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), but also exotic languages such as Japanese. But recently Hungarian people seem to have noticed market principles at work behind languages, and the choice of English is now increasing.

It is common knowledge that a “planned economy” is sometimes coun-terproductive. Until recently Japanese was not taught in some East Asian countries, even at university level, because of the unhappy memory of the past. Japan proscribed the teaching of English during the World War II,2but recent research has shown that English was taught in some high schools in rural parts of Japan at the time. On the other hand, planning is necessary for the protection of languages in danger of extinction.3 These clear cases of language choice in a “planned economy” should be ignored in analysing economic factors that have a bearing on the ranking of languages, though it may be difficult to always distinguish them from choice in a “liberal econ-omy”.

Figure 3. GNP of the languages in the world E = English, J = Japanese; G = German, F = French, S = Spanish, I = Italian, R = Russian, C = Chinese, OT = Others

The order of languages in Figure 1 can be explained in large measure on the basis of the economic power of languages, a factor which is determined on a worldwide scale. However, geographical proximity also has an effect; with nearby countries transportation costs are lower and the exchange of goods and people is easier, so the incentive to learn the language in ques-tion is greater. The relative popularity of Japanese as shown in Figure 1 is


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due to the great weight of neighbouring China. The “proximity effect” is crucial for understanding global dynamics, including the language market4.In East Asia, its effectiveness is reinforced by another factor, the common script which, not least by reducing transmission costs, turns China, Japan and Korea into a regional group of Chinese character using countries5.

2.3. The cultural level or information quantity

In order to explain the status of the first ten or so languages, the present economic power of their speech communities is insufficient. The cultural level of development which has been accumulated from the remote past must also be taken into account. Knowledge recorded in books was the main source of information in the past, as is suggested in Figure 4. In this graph Chinese is exceptional because various materials are published in minority languages. Modern science and technology were written mainly in European languages. English, German and French were therefore indispen-sable languages in this regard. English, German and French were also stud-ied by those who wanted to acquaint themselves with philosophy and litera-ture in the original form.

Information on Internet sites (home pages) has become more im-portant in our time. English is of paramount importance here, but a great deal of digitalized information has been accumulated in Ger-man, Japanese and Chinese, too. These developments take place on a worldwide scale, but they are limited to specific domains. Personal preferences are also influential. For example, people study Italian for cooking, Spanish for flamenco and Japanese for anime or cartoons.

2.4. Individual contributions to the market value of languages

The possibility for individuals to contribute to the market value of lan-guages according the three factors above is variable. Only a weak correla-tion can be established. As for the first factor, population size, one individ-ual’s contribution is minimal but usually steady. With regard to the second factor, economy, individuals can contribute to some extent, working dili-gently for a company, for example. If an individual succeeds in creating a big international company, the personal contribution to the market value of his or her language is greater. With respect to the third factor, culture and

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information, individual contributions are likewise highly variable. A best-selling author can have a considerable impact, for example. In the past, authors such as Kant, Goethe, Thomas Mann and other scholars and novel-ists surely helped to increase the number of foreign learners of German. By comparison, Chinese and Japanese writers were less influential in terms of attracting foreigners to study Chinese and Japanese in order to read original literary and philosophical texts without translation.

Ratio of Publication by Languages

5.1%6.7%

7.7%

11.8%

13.3%28.0%

4.7%

4.5%

4.4%

4.0%

2.4%

1.6%

5.8%

Japanese

Spanish

Franch

German

Chinese

English

Russian

Portuguese

Korean

Italian

Dutch

Swedish

Others

Figure 4.

For a country’s literary works to become known abroad they must first be translated. Market principles make themselves felt here, too. Even where the lofty domains of the human spirit are concerned, we cannot get past the economy. The ranking of the languages of the world can be better ex-plained by paying due attention to the economy of culture.

To conclude this section, on the basis of the three factors consid-ered above it can be said that at present the position of German and Japanese in the ranking of the world’s languages is similar.

3. The decline of German in modern Japan

Next, let us consider the status of German in Japan. The decline of German in Japan has often been discussed, and it has been analysed from various points of view in Ammon (1994), among others. Additional examples will be examined on the basis of more recent data. Historically, German was


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second only to English as a foreign language in higher education. Data about foreigners hired by the Japanese government (oyatoi gaikokujin) at the end of 19th century shows that most of them came from English speak-ing countries (Inoue 2001b). At the same time, it is significant that many Japanese professors who were allowed to study abroad went to Germany. Germany was especially popular among medical doctors and scientists. Prior to World War II, many famous scholars such as Mori Ogai, Saito Mokichi and Kitazato Shibasaburo obtained degrees from German universi-ties.

In the past, the order of most frequently studied foreign language in Ja-pan was English first, then German and French. After World War II it changed to English, French and then German. The Japanese Ministry of Education and Science has repeatedly conducted surveys of foreign lan-guage teaching at the university level. According to the data presented in Figure 5, Chinese overtook German in 2003, and the order became English, Chinese, German and French. This is because the number of private univer-sities offering Chinese exceeded that of those offering German. In public and national universities the order of most frequently studied foreign lan-guages is still English, German, French and then Chinese6. There have been no changes here. However, private universities are more sensitive to market forces and public demand in language education.

English has been virtually the only foreign language taught in Japanese high schools for some time. However, according to a recent survey by the Ministry of Education and Science7, a certain number of high schools offer classes in other foreign languages. In 2003, the order of foreign languages besides English taught in high school was Chinese, French, Korean, Span-ish and German. In 1993, German was still in third place, but during the decade that followed it was overtaken first by Korean and then by Spanish.

As shown in Figure 6, already in the 1990s, the order of languages taught at private language schools was English in first place and Chinese second. The recent popularity of Chinese is also observed in Western and Asian countries; students of Japanese are declining, while the numbers learning Chinese are increasing. This global popularity of Chinese corre-sponds to the economic development of China in recent years.

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Figure 5.


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Figure 6. Languages taught in Language Schools in Japan 1997 and 2002

On the other hand, the popularity of German in Japan is declining and the number of German classes in private conversation schools is diminishing. Sales statistics of textbooks of foreign language courses offered by NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, show a decrease in German teaching materials (Inoue 2000). The unification of East and West Germany was expected by some to boost the popularity of German, but the effect was only ephemeral. In sum, the future prospects of German as a foreign lan-guage in Japan are not promising.

4. The future of German and Japanese

In this section the future prospects of German and Japanese in the world will be investigated, considering both positive and negative aspects of the present state of affairs. To this end it is necessary to take into account a variety of social and economic factors.

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4.1. “English imperialism”

First, consider a fact that bodes ill for German and Japanese, the power of English. It cannot be ignored in any discussion about the future of German and Japanese in the world.

Tsunoda (1993) presents data about the languages of articles in aca-demic journals that are indicative of the development of the last century.

Figure 7.

English has held the top position for the past 100 years. For some time, German and French were competing for second place, and Japanese flour-ished in the latter half of the 20th century8. However, these trends must be regarded as peripheral to the greater trend of English monopolization. The so-called “linguistic imperialism” (Phillipson 1992) of English is becoming stronger in many domains. Considered in the context of geopolitics and world history, the advance of English seems irreversible. Will German and Japanese be downgraded to second-rate languages in the future as a conse-quence?


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4.2. Regional economic areas and the German and Japanese languages

According to one theory, regional differences in the sociolinguistic situa-tion of languages give reason for cautious optimism, but in actual fact re-gionalization is not a good prospect for many languages. Consider the anal-ogy of a common currency. Most parts of the European Union (EU) now use the Euro. The idea of an association of European countries, which first emerged after World War II, took about fifty years to be realized. Because of the proximity effect within the EU, it is easier for German to hold its own in Europe, where the rights of official languages of EU member states are guaranteed. The regionalization of the economy in the Far East is in the early stages of formation, but the former “Dragon Countries” of the Confu-cian cultural area – the area of Chinese characters – may yet create an area of common interest in future. Recent observation of the “linguistic land-scape” shows that in major cities of these countries, multilingual signs us-ing English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are spreading, signifying a common language group9. This language landscape is reflected in language choices in higher education, especially at universities. If several regional economic areas are formed on the earth’s surface in the future, mutual lan-guage learning within the area will flourish, and languages other than Eng-lish may find their own place of existence10.

However, the status of a regional language is not everlasting. A similar process was observed in the past with regard to the decline of Japanese dialects11. Small-scale dialectal differences disappeared and dialectal ex-pressions used in larger areas spread wider; at the same time, local common languages flourished. However, the standard language has eventually pre-vailed over intermediate varieties, with the result that local differences are completely disappearing. It is safe to predict that present dialectal differ-ences will eventually disappear from Japan.

The role of German and Japanese in regional areas may be compared with the substitution of Japanese dialects by the standard language in Japan. It is likely that the world-wide advance of English will lead to a decrease in vitality of major languages such as Japanese and German. Thus the effects of regionalization on these languages may not be as positive as they seem.

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Figure 8.


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4.3. Automatic translation

Conversely, some seemingly ominous developments, such as machine translation, may actually harbour promising prospects. If automatic transla-tion becomes more realistic and easily applicable, ordinary people will feel even less need to learn foreign languages. Automatic translation free of charge is available on certain Internet sites, and ever more translation soft-ware is being developed and marketed. As shown in Figure 8, most transla-tion software is centred on English. There is a conspicuous correlation be-tween the languages for which translation software is available and the average GNP per person of the countries where they are spoken. Economic principles seem to be at work here. For example, Japanese-German transla-tion software is scarce. The quality of machine translation is not yet satis-factory, depending as it does on the quantity of the software. Programmes for automatic interpretation of voice input are still in an embryonic state. This means that automatic translation is not yet a counter-incentive for foreign language learning. On the contrary, the necessity of translation will be felt more keenly, which will stimulate language learning.

4.4. A positive aspect: the pie of foreign language learning will become bigger

The factors thus far considered for the most part pertain to the ranking of the world’s major languages. The final section of this paper discusses fac-tors relating to the number of learners of German and Japanese. Two main factors are to be considered.

4.4.1. The trend towards higher education

The first factor is a trend towards higher education or higher academic de-grees. Higher education is increasingly in demand by the world population, and this will automatically boost foreign language education. International communication will increase, leading to increasing demand for language learning worldwide. The absolute numbers of learners will thus increase. In other words, the pie of language learners will become bigger in the future. This means that the economic value of German and Japanese will not de-

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crease to the extent that might be expected on the basis of present circum-stances.

4.4.2. Increase of multilingual usage

The second factor which will contribute to the future vitality of German and Japanese is the spread of multilingualism rather than bilingualism. Multilingualism will be more prevalent worldwide. A combination of mother tongue and English is likely to be used in some advanced communi-ties, but use of two languages, i.e., this particular kind of bilingualism, will not be sufficient. Part of the population that is now monolingual will be-come bilingual, and part of the population that is now bilingual will become multilingual. In order to facilitate communication between neighbouring countries, the demand for major regional languages such as German and Japanese is likely to increase.

This trend can be extrapolated from Figure 6, which shows that lan-guages other than English, German among them, were taught in a larger number of schools in 2002 than 1997. The number of English-language schools seems to be decreasing, but this is due to the fact that a growing number of large firms have in-house English-language training. In general, the market value of languages in Japan is appreciating. In other words, the factors which contribute to the positive prospects of languages other than English are (1) the increase in international communication and (2) the increase in language demand by industry and other sectors of the economy.

However, the question of total national expenditures for foreign lan-guage education, which is too often ignored, also needs to be considered. For example, in the controversy about making English the second official language of Japan12, economic considerations were lacking.

5. By way of conclusion: a bright future

The above discussion has demonstrated that the future of German and Japanese may not be as bleak as many observations would suggest. How-ever, this is the biased view of one who has connections with language education. The prediction that languages other than English can survive in the world of the future is significant in another sense. It means that there are still certain tendencies countervailing the strong unifying power of the


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spread of English. This is theoretically connected with the perpetuation of linguistic diversity and the continued existence of various mother tongues. The vitality of languages can be measured in various domains and by a variety of factors. The extent to which a language is studied as a foreign language is at the apex of the vitality hierarchy. This index applies to a small number of big languages only. At the other extreme, many small languages are in danger of extinction. However, even powerful languages such as German and Japanese are losing ground to the world language Eng-lish.

Of the three composite factors of the market value of languages dis-cussed above, the first two, population size and per-capita GNP, can easily be framed in economic terms. However, this is not so easy with the third factor, cultural elaboration and information, because there is much resis-tance against subsuming cultural and intellectual matters under economic principles. This is quite understandable because while certain properties of language can be theorized and explained in economic terms, others cannot. In this sense language is “invaluable”.

Notes

1. See Gottlieb (this volume) on the j y kanji list of Chinese characters for eve-ryday life in Japan, and Holenstein (this volume) on loanwords and place na-mes.

2. According to Ulrich Ammon (personal communication), the Nazi government decided to teach Japanese compulsorily in Germany. But the Nazi system col-lapsed before this plan could be realized.

3. Hara (this volume) for a discussion of several cases in Europe. 4. This concept relates to that of “glocalizaton” and “Japan’s third way” discus-

sed by Katsuragi (this volume). 5. Transliteration problems are discussed at length by Holenstein (this volume)

who, however, largely ignores the problems of East Asian countries and their non-alphabetic scripts.

6. According to Coulmas (this volume), Tokyo University professors use pre-dominantly Japanese in their research papers for university publications. Ho-wever, in recent years there has been an increase of the number of papers writ-ten in German. One may be forgiven for raising the question whether this is so because, thanks to the decreasing number of students, German teachers have more time to write papers.

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7. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/16/05/04051101/016.htm 8. Maher’s study of medical research papers in Japan (this volume) is a case in

point. 9. What Andrew Horvat (personal communication) calls an “enabling environ-

ment” should also been taken into account in considering foreign language education in East Asian countries. Japanese has a deficit in this regard and it has therefore been difficult for it to surpass German in university education.

10. This idea is correlated with Ammon’s (this volume) suggestion of language alliances. It may be more effective, however, if German and Japanese con-centrated their defense on their proper regions, Europe and East Asia, respec-tively.

11. As Katsuragi (this volume) points out, Japanese dialects are often mentioned in language planning reports, but actually almost nothing has been done to support them. Rather, the focus is on the “common language” (ky ts go) and the standard language (hy jungo).

12. Heinrich’s discussion of “English as the second official language in Japan” (this volume) ignores economic factors, while Ehlich’s considerations on the economics of monolingualism versus multilingualism (in this volume) provide an incentive for a more specific research. Cf. Coulmas (1992) in this connec-tion. Most of the language revival movements in the EU discussed by Hara (this volume) are hard to analyze in economic terms because they do not abide by economic principles. As Ammon (this volume) implies, this may even hold for the promotion of German and Japanese abroad, which does not seem to y-ield a return on the investment.

References

Ammon, Ulrich (ed.) 1994 Die Deutsche Sprache in Japan: Verwendung und Studium. Munich:

Iudicium. 2001 The Dominance of English as a Language of Science: Effects on the

Non-English Languages and Language Communities. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Coulmas, Florian 1992 Language and Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. (Japanese translation.

1994. Kotoba no Keizaigaku. Tokyo:Taishukan.) Inoue, Fumio

1997 Market value of languages in Japan. Japanese Linguistics 2: 40–61.


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1998 Language market and its basic mechanisms. Area and Culture Stud-ies 57: 88–103.

2000 Nihongo no Nedan [The Price of Japanese].Tokyo: Taishukan. 2001a Nihongo wa Ikinokoreruka. Keizaigengogaku no Shiten kara [Can

Japanese Survive? The view from econolinguistics]. Tokyo: PHP. 2001b English as a language of science in Japan. From corpus planning to

status planning. In The Dominance of English as a Language of Sci-ence: Effects on the Non-English Languages and Language Commu-nities, Ammon, Ulrich (ed.), 447–469. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Kigoshi, Tsutomu 2004 Chiriteki-kyori kara mita gengo no shijo-kachi [Market value of lan-

guages from the viewpoint of geographical distances]. Gengo 33(9): 80–83.

Miyazima, Tatuo 1992 Nihongo Doitsugo no naka no gairaigo [Loanwords in Japanese and

German]. Keiryo Kokugogaku [Mathematical Linguistics] 18 (6): 263–87.

Phillipson, Robert 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shin-puro Nihongo 1999 Nihongo-kan Kokusai Sensasu Tanjun-shukei-hyo [Simple account-

ing table of the international survey of Japanese]. Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo [National Institute for Japanese Language].

Tsunoda, Minoru 1993 Les langues des publications scientifiques au 20e siècle. Proceedings

of the XVth International Congress of Linguists (Quebec 1992), 4: 43–46.

The debate on English as an official language in Japan

Patrick Heinrich

1. Introduction

The influence of English is growing throughout large parts of the world. According to Crystal (1997: 3), English played some kind of official role in over seventy countries in 1997. The list of these countries has become longer. Countries such as Chile, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines or Sri Lanka have since then discussed whether English should attain some kind of official status in specific domains or regions (Diaz 2005; Ko, 2000; Ko-rea Herald 2005; Poon 2004; Rother 2004; Sprague 1999). In 2000, there was also a debate whether English should become Japan’s second official language1. Although there were schemes to adopt a foreign language in modern Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and the American oc-cupation period (1945–1952) (Coulmas 1991; Carroll 2001; Heinrich 2005a), the 2000 scheme was the first ever to advocate a bilingual language regime. Language regimes are defined by Coulmas (2005: 3) as the result of intervention in administered language in order to respond to changing communicative needs. The idea of introducing English as second official language in Japan can be traced back to 1999 when it was discussed among members of the House of Representatives. It became widely known on 18 January 2000, when a private consultation circle, which was attached to the office of the Prime Minister Keiz Obuchi, published a booklet entitled Ideas for Japan in the 21st Century: The Japanese Frontier is within Japan.

The publication of the booklet led to a widespread debate in newspapers and magazines (see Shioda 2000 for a listing). According to Fukase (2000: 31), three different reactions towards the proposal emerged: (1) The role of English as the lingua franca in a globalized world, indispensable in fields such as commerce, politics and science, was highlighted. In accordance with this outlook, English language education was promoted from a young age and the idea of introducing English as an official language of Japan was appreciated. It is worth noting in this context that it had already been de-cided at that time that English language education would be introduced in Japanese elementary schools from 2002 onwards. (2) It was argued that

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English had grown into a language so dominant that it would inevitably continue to become more influential, irrespective of whether it would or would not be assigned official status in Japan. (3) It was stressed that only a small number of people were actually in need of higher proficiency in Eng-lish. Hence, the introduction of English as an official language was not necessary. Supporters of this view argue that giving English official status would result in a schism in Japanese society between those who are and those who are not proficient in English. Furthermore, the introduction of English as an official language was perceived to entail unwanted effects on Japanese culture.

The present paper discusses aspects of this proposal in the light of lan-guage regimes in transformation. It does not attempt to give a comprehen-sive summary of the debate. In Japanese, such a summary is provided by Yoshisato Suzuki (2002). Rather, the focus will be on the arguments brought forth against the proposal by well-known Japanese linguists, in the main Susumu no, Takao Suzuki, Kei Nakamura, Katsuhiko Tanaka and Yukio Tsuda. A study of their arguments is important when considering language regimes in transformation because they support and defend the existing Japanese language regime. Furthermore, the opponents are recog-nized authorities on Japanese. It is their attitudes which have to be over-come if change is envisioned. The existing Japanese language regime is based on the ideology of linguistic nationalism (Lee 1996; Yasuda 2000). Given the ubiquity of language regimes based on this ideology, this allows an analysis of language regimes in transition on a more general level. Lan-guage regimes are established discursively. Insights into the discursive construction and the conflicting language-ideological views attached to specific language regimes are therefore pivotal in order to understand lan-guage regimes in transformation.

The debate under consideration cannot be grasped outside the context in which it was embedded. Therefore, a short overview is in order. The year 2000 is of course remembered as a time when expectations of the Internet and dotcom companies were driving the NASDAC and other technology stock exchanges to unseen heights. The information available on the Inter-net was doubling every eighteenth month and 80 per cent of all Internet pages were written in English at the time. The internationalization of Japan was progressing rapidly. As a result, English became well established as a working language in many international companies. At the Hiroshima and Toyko headquarters of Madza alone, seventy English language classes were taught to company employees. The dominance English had attained was

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also reflected in the fact that, in 2000, 85 per cent of all classes taught by Berlitz language schools in Japan were on English, in spite of the fact that Berlitz offered training in more than thirty languages (Suzuki and Imanishi 2000: 24–25). The world of business pressed for better English language training. Yoshio Terazawa (2000), vice-president of Japan’s leading stock brokerage company Nomura Securities, pointed out that as an international actor in the financial world Japan suffered from poor proficiency in English. The year 2000 was also when the catch-word of Japan’s “lost decade” (ushinawareta j nen) was coined, that is to say, ten years of weak eco-nomic performance with an average GDP growth rate of just 0,5 per cent. Finally, the poor overall performance by the Japanese in the TOEFL Eng-lish proficiency tests of 1998 was discussed in detail in 2000. Although Japan improved somewhat in comparison to the 1997 results, when it ranked last among the Asian countries participating, the TOEFL scores made it to the headlines only in 2000. The news was this: among 21 Asian countries, Japan had ranked 18th, with an average score of 501 points, leav-ing only Afghanistan, Cambodia and Laos behind. Japan was thus doing worse than its immediate neighbours China (562), South Korea (535) and Taiwan (510). This, in short, was the background from which the scheme to introduce English as second official language in Japan emerged.

2. The proposal

The proposal to introduce English as second official language in Japan was related to the policy of developing Japan as a knowledge society. With regard to languages, the policy included an emphasis on “beautiful Japa-nese” (utsukushii nihongo) and an improvement in English language profi-ciency (Mainichi Shinbun, morning edition, 25 Feb. 2000). In order to pre-pare Japan for the challenges of the 21st century, the late Prime Minister Obuchi set up the afore-mentioned Consultation Circle for Japan in the 21st Century in March 1999. It was attached directly to his office and consisted of five subgroups: (1) “A Lively Japan in the World” (sekai ni ikiru nihon),(2) “Abundance and Vitality” (yutakasa to katsuryoku), (3) “A Safe and Benevolent Life” (anshin to uruoi no seikatsu), (4) “Beautiful Land and a Secure Society” (utsukushii kokudo to anzen na shakai) and (5) “The Fu-ture of the Japanese” (nihonjin no mirai) (Shioda 2000: 36). In total these groups had 49 members. The scheme to introduce English as an official language in Japan was proposed by the fifth group. Between its meetings,


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members had visited several Asian countries and had held discussions with policy makers there. Interviews conducted in Singapore – where English is the official language and Mandarin, Malay and Tamil the so-called “mother-tongues” – turned out to be influential. Moteki (2002: 165) calls attention to the fact that the idea of English being necessary for the devel-opment of a “global literacy” (gurobaru riterashii) was only raised after the Singapore visit. The proposal was not undisputed within the consultation council. According to the chairman, Yasuo Kawai, in the booklet because members felt that the statement “enriching a lively English language educa-tion” was too weak to address the problem of insufficient English language proficiency in a globalizing world (Suzuki Y. 2002: 298–299).

There emerged two main supporters of the scheme, K ichi Kat , a for-mer high-ranking diplomat and former secretary general of the Liberal De-mocratic Party (LDP), and Y ichi Funabashi, an influential commentator on political and current affairs (Kunihiro 2000: 18). Funabashi became the main proponent of the scheme. He had already considered the idea of en-hancing the status of English the previous year in a published discussion with linguist Takao Suzuki (Funabashi and Suzuki 1999). Funabashi and Kat found support among influential politicians such as Shigefumi Matsu-zawa, at the time a strong candidate for the post of education minister. Fol-lowing the publication of the booklet, a project team within the Democratic Party of Japan was established. It coined the slogan “Towards a bilingual society” (Mezase! Bairingaru shakai), which was displayed on its home-page. Within ten years, the project team envisioned, English could become Japan’s second official language (MEDKKPC 2000).

Before entering into an analysis of the arguments against the scheme, a brief summary of the arguments that were made in its support is given. In view of the complex issues that the scheme addressed, it is worth mention-ing that only nineteen lines of the booklet are devoted to the idea of making English official. In a short paragraph, current English proficiency is judged to be insufficient. Further, the view is expressed that English is not just any foreign language but has developed into the “international lingua franca”(kokusai ky ts go). In order to adapt linguistically to an internationalizing world, situations should be created in Japan in which Japanese people use English among themselves. This is to ensure the development of better English language skills. To this end, all national and local government in-stitutions should publish their documents and design their homepages in both Japanese and English. As a long-term goal, English should be made the “second official language” (daini k y go) (NSNKK 2000: 20).


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The debate started immediately after the publication of the booklet. The supporters substantiated and defended their position, pointing out as they did that the lack of proficiency in English is not just a language problem but an issue concerning Japan more profoundly (Shioda 2000: 38; Suzuki Y. 2002: 301–302). Due to the changes brought about by globalization, Funa-bashi (2000b: 23) sees the danger of a digital and English language profi-ciency divide in Japanese society, that is to say, an unequal distribution of knowledge pertaining to computer technology and English. In order to con-front this danger, he proposes that all Japanese nationals enhance their Eng-lish proficiency. In a globalized world, English is bound to become the “survival language” (Funabashi 2000b: 25). Funabashi (2000c: 82) elabo-rates on his idea of a digital and English divide, referring to unique proper-ties of the Internet such as its access and publication opportunities irrespec-tive of factors such as the region its users come from, their education or social standing.

The need for the entire population to acquire high proficiency in English is grounded in the idea of “global literacy” (gurobaru riterashii or kokusaitaiwa n ryoku). Towards this end, current English language education is perceived to be insufficient (Funabashi 2000c: 82). Thus, Japanese educa-tion policy has to be changed fundamentally and should henceforth aim at educating “world citizens” (sekai shimin). This implies the need to raise English language proficiency in Japan to an international level (Funabashi 2000c: 83). LDP politician Shigefumi Matsuzawa went on to propose a law for the promotion of English. Once the law is enacted, he argues, English can be promoted as a second language in the fields of education, society and culture. Official documents and street signs can be written in both Japanese and English. Furthermore, the entire TV broadcasting output can be bilingual. By implementing these measures, Matsuzawa believes, the young generation will be bilingual within ten years (Mainichi Shinbun,morning edition, 25 Feb. 2000).

The point which Funabashi (2000a; 2000b; 2000c) emphasizes most fervently is the larger context the proposal addresses. The introduction of English as second official language, he stresses, should not be conceived too narrowly as a “debate on English language education” (eigo ky iku-ron). Besides providing access to information on the Internet, the spread of and enhanced proficiency in English will also serve as an important means to facilitate migrants’ integration into Japanese society. He points out that due to the rapid aging of the Japanese population, migrants with specific skills will be needed in future. In this sense, the proposal to enhance Eng-


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lish language proficiency calls for a “debate on state strategy” (kokka sen-ryaku-ron). Making English Japan’s second official language, he argues, is an endeavour which will strengthen the country’s vitality. Finally, Funaba-shi points out that many Japanese feel that mutual understanding between Japan and foreign countries is insufficient. Japan, in short, is once again at a juncture where it needs to construct a new civilization by embracing ele-ments of a foreign culture. This time, he believes, Japan needs to adopt English as an official language.

3. The arguments of the opponents

Throughout the entire debate, the view that English is the dominating lan-guage in a globalizing world and that its influence will continue to grow is never challenged. Nonetheless, opponents reject the proposal out of hand. Their major criticism is levelled against “English language imperialism” (eigo teikoku shugi), “English language rule” (eigo shihai) and “English language invasion” (eigo shinryaku). In other words, attention is drawn to the nexus between language and power and it is stressed thereby that power is held only by native speakers of English. This renders the proposal unac-ceptable. One of the main critics is Yukio Tsuda, a US-educated linguist. He points out what he considers to be three drawbacks of the scheme (Tsuda 2000: 84–85; 2003: 221–224). These are: (1) the Japanese national language and culture will be influenced by English in a negative way; (2) discrimination between those who speak English well and those who do not will be institutionalized; and (3) “English nationalism” will be spread through the medium of the English language (see below). Summarizing the arguments of the critics, Funabashi (2000a: 197–198) adds three points of his own. (1) The proponents of the scheme have a minority complex vis-à-vis English. (2) High-level English language proficiency is sufficient for those who actually need it. (3) The introduction of English will cause harm to Japan’s national language, culture and identity. We will turn next to a more detailed overview of these issues.

The proposal to make English an official language in Japan has been re-peatedly linked to linguistic imperialism (e.g. Mainichi Shinbun, evening edition, 14 March 2000; Moteki 2002; Tsuda 2003). Since the idea of in-troducing English as a second official language did not originate in large groups of English speakers residing in Japan, Katsuhiro Tanaka (2000b: 21) calls it a reincarnation of Japanese colonial language ideology, this time,


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however, centred on English and directed at the Japanese. Morimoto points out that in discussing the poor TOEFL scores, a newspaper printed a map showing what he calls the “developed countries of English”. It strikes him that these countries were former colonies. The scheme for the officializa-tion of English thus appears to him as an act of self-colonialization. It will render Japan the 51st state of the US ( no, Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 266). Kai (2000), director of the National Institute for Japanese Language at the time, also perceives English to be the language of the US and raises the question as to why an international standard ought to be US American. The most ardent reproach of language imperialism comes from Tsuda (2000; 2003), who fears what he perceives as the Americanization of the Japanese language and culture. Recent student behaviour, he argues, is a harbinger of change in that direction. According to his observations, Japanese students increasingly often use American gestures when communicating with each other. Such linguistic behaviour reminds him of a colonial situation. He worries that an uncritical adaptation of American linguistic behaviour will influence “the mental structures of the Japanese”. This process he calls “colonization of the mind” (Tsuda 2000: 85). Tsuda believes that Japanese attitudes towards English are reminiscent of the so-called Stockholm syn-drome, i.e., an emotional attachment and sympathy of hostages towards their captors. He furthermore speculates whether this Stockholm syndrome-like attachment to English is not the real reason behind insufficient English language proficiency in Japan. In other words, although many Japanese claim to like English, they actually despise it (Mikawa 2001). In defence of Japanese, Moteki (2002: 184) further points out that more than two million foreigners are enrolled in Japanese language courses around the world at the present time and that Japanese is thus itself a language of international communication.

As mentioned above, there have been proposals to introduce foreign languages in Japan in the past. Arinori Mori’s 1872 proposal to replace Japanese by English was criticized on the grounds that introducing of a foreign language would create a schism within society (Baba 1873; Whit-ney [1872] 1972). A similar concern resurfaced in the current debate under consideration here. In the event, it is accompanied by the critique that the entire population is expected to learn English. The latter point, it is argued, is the very basis in which linguistic discrimination will be rooted. Mikawa (2001: 188–189) and Watanabe (2000) maintain that the scheme is elitist in the way that it imposes the duty of mastering English on the entire popula-tion, while only a small elite will benefit from it. Hisashi Inoue (2000), a


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writer and columnist with a long-standing interest in language, maintains that forcing “everybody to learn English is the same as forcing everybody to learn to play the piano. It is unmerciful and absurd. It suffices if those who need English study it intensively.” Takao Suzuki (2000) considers the idea unrealistic because, in his opinion, the endeavour to achieve societal Japanese-English bilingualism will take 100 years to realize.2 Tsuda (2000: 84–85; 2003: 221–224) provides a detailed discussion on the schism which might arise in Japanese society. He claims that since many Japanese de-spise the use of English in Japan, forcing it upon the entire population by power of state will be problematic. Finally, making the entire population study English for the sake of the state constitutes an infringement on their liberty. By affording one language authority over another, he claims, dis-crimination will be the inevitable result. People growing up in English-speaking countries will have an advantage over everybody else. Also, the proposal will further strengthen the existing appreciation of Westerners in Japan. Hence, it entails the risk that English and its speakers would lord it over Japanese and its speakers. In this way, the introduction of English as an official language will serve as “a stepping stone for English language nationalism” (Tsuda 2000: 85).

In the course of the debate, the view has been expressed that Japanese is in a state of confusion and that “confusion in language” (kotoba no midare)negatively affects Japanese culture and identity. Such warnings are accom-panied by a call to defend, maintain and teach “beautiful Japanese” (utsu-kushii nihongo). Kai (2000) aligned himself with this viewpoint, warning that a language reform as radical as the introduction of English as second official language would be detrimental to school education and ultimately lower Japanese language proficiency. This would, in effect, result in a “weakening of national consciousness”. He suggests, therefore, that more attention be placed on a good command of Japanese and that “good and splendid Japanese” (yoi subarashii nihongo) be spread across the world. Nakamura (2002: 114) stresses the point that educating cosmopolitan peo-ple should not imply cultivating “people devoid of nationality” (mu-kokusekijin), stressing that nationality and its cultural icons need to be taken seriously. Nakamura also criticizes the written style of the proposal, citing it as a prime example of a corrupted style because of an abundance of Western loanwords. In his own words: “Ironically, one can think of the Japanese used in this very report as a symbol of the danger the Japanese would face if English were to become an official language” (Nakamura 2002: 110).


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A connection between language and thought, culture and identity is es-tablished in several publications. An unidentified commentator of Mainichi Shinbun expresses concern that introducing English would estrange the Japanese from their national language. Since language is the root of culture, only the use of “beautiful Japanese” (utsukushii nihongo) can guarantee a beautiful Japanese culture. If a language disappears, so does the spirit of its speakers (Mainichi Shinbun, evening edition, 14 March 2000). The idea of the national language defining the nation and its spirit is also stressed by Nakamura (2002: 113), who writes that “it is generally considered among all nations [minzoku] across the world that language can be equated with nation. Japanese are Japanese because they use Japanese. The Japanese culture and the Japanese essential qualities [nihonjin no honshitsu] are ex-pressed in the Japanese language.” Accordingly, introducing English will endanger these qualities and the effects of such a policy will inevitably be negative (Nakamura 2002: 114). In a similar vein, ta (2000) points out that Japanese identity is encapsulated in the Japanese language and that this connection will be undermined through the introduction of an additional official language.

The link between language, culture and identity is further dwelled on by no, Morimoto and Suzuki (2000: 269–273) in a published debate. They

reason that the scheme overlooks the fact that language is not just a tool for the transmission of information. Rather, speaking English and speaking Japanese are not the same because language and thought are inescapably interconnected. Both Japanese and English have a long history during which specific ways of thought and emotions have found entry into these languages. With the introduction of English as second official language, they argue, the Japanese people as they exist at the present time will vanish. If everybody is English-Japanese bilingual, it will be impossible to know in which language the other thinks. The close relationship between language and thought is exemplified by a discussion about whether the Japanese are better at “feeling” than at “observing” due to the Japanese climate, which they believe changes in delicate ways. Consequently, living in Japan has always meant being sensible to subtle changes ( no, Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 273). Hisashi Inoue (2000) argues that the language on which the Japanese culture of the 21st century should be based can only be Japanese. If English is introduced, he warns, “the basis of thought” will be lost and the “state of affairs” (monogoto) can no longer be deeply reflected upon. Such a nation, he believes, has no future. He goes on to criticize the sorry state of the language, in particular among the younger generation. Young-


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sters who constantly repeat expressions like muka tsuku (~this sucks~) are obviously unable to express their feelings in an elaborate manner. More thorough mother-tongue instruction is thus an important responsibility of compulsory education.

The opponents’ comments are not restricted to criticism. They also make language planning proposals, which are summarily introduced here because they contain a number of language-ideological notions. These pro-posals are centred on improving Japanese and English language education and better English university entrance tests (e.g. Sat 2000; Suzuki and Imanishi 2000; Tanaka S. 2000: 203–205). no (2000: 131) suggests estab-lishing a three-year English graduate school for 500 students annually, to be recruited from all faculties and trained in English in their respective disciplines. This will guarantee a sufficient number of fully competent Eng-lish speakers in various fields.3 Takao Suzuki (2000) argues for the lan-guages of neighbouring countries to be promoted, that is to say, Korean, Chinese and Russian, and, with a view to oil resources, Arabic. Suzuki is concerned that the whole world is becoming westernized and therefore promotes linguistic pluralism of a kind. Japan, he argues, can contribute to such pluralism by its unique concept of “harmony” (wa) which contrasts with the “rigid” (gisugisu) Western attitudes. To start with, Japanese should become a working language of the UN. In a similar way, Moteki (2002: 186) too suggests that more efforts be made to strengthen and expand Japa-nese as an international language. Tsuda (2003: 223–224), finally, advo-cates following the French example of banning foreign words in the na-tional language. Rather than simply equating internationalization with the spread of English, the French policy would make a contribution to the di-versity of European culture.

On the basis of the above summary of the arguments against the intro-duction of English as second official language in Japan, we can now ana-lyse the underlying ideological notions. After a brief definition of language ideology, the importance of debates and language norm authorities as an object of research will be discussed.

4. Language ideological notions underlying the opponents’ arguments

Language ideology is a set of beliefs about the origin and effect of language structure and use, as well as the way in which these beliefs are promoted and spread beyond the social groups whose interests they serve. In other


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words, the social genesis of language ideologies and the specific interests they serve can be traced back in history. They sustain and promote the in-terests of certain social groups at the expense of the interests of others. This fact notwithstanding, successful language ideologies are recognized as le-gitimate beyond the group whose interests they serve. This makes language ideologies appear commonsensical and, thereby, invisible. It is for this rea-son that language-ideological debates are of particular interests to students of language ideology. In them commonsensical views on language are chal-lenged and thus rendered visible (Blommaert 1999). Ideological beliefs attain their ideological character not because these beliefs are wrong, (they can be true and ideological, or wrong and non-ideological), but because they support specific interest and reproduce power inequalities (Thompson 1984). It is in this sense that the proponents’ views are discussed as being ideological.

Since language-ideological debates are not discussions about language alone but also about power (and, potentially, all phenomena linked to power), they often include attempts at undermining one’s opponents’ au-thority. In the event, the proposal of English officialization is characterized as “laughable” (Tanaka 2000a), “stupid” (Nakamura (2002) and “absurd” ( no, Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 269). The assessment of the proponents and their language use is similarly strict. Morimoto criticizes the vast amount of loanwords such as gurobaru riterashii (global literacy), gabanansu (gov-ernance) or furontia (frontier) in the booklet because of which, he says, he cannot understand some of its contents, quoting “Japan’s frontier is within Japan" (nihon no furontia wa nihon no naka ni aru) as an example. He concludes that this document is “America-like” (amerika-teki). no con-curs, adding that it would obviously be a huge mistake to entrust questions of foreign language education to people with such a poor command of their own language ( no, Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 265). Later, no criticizes the growing influence of English in the music industry, regardless of the fact that these people, in his opinion, cannot speak English properly, or Japanese, to boot ( no, Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 275). Katsuhiko Tanaka (2000a: 46) diagnoses a lack of education on the part of the proponents and admonishes them to be ashamed for producing such strange schemes while portraying themselves as cosmopolitans. The implicit message of these statements is this: we are the legitimate authorities on Japanese. Hence, we define its proper use and sanction any deviations. Founded on such linguis-tic authority, it is for us to make proposals on language planning, rather then anybody else.


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In a comment on the debate, Kan (2000), professor of cultural and social studies at Tokyo University, points out that it has merely reproduced argu-ments that have been in circulation ever since the Meiji period (1868–1912). Such a reproach is crucial because it exposes the fact that the requirements of communication in the novel context of globalization were discussed using arguments which had developed in a completely different context, namely that of language modernization. Nonetheless, Kan has a point. In the opponents’ view, a nation is defined by its language. They reproduce the central idea that a language nation is monolingual and its membership exclusive, which rests on a belief that the identity of language and nation is a natural one that came into existence by itself. This view has, however, been convincingly refuted (see e.g. Bauman and Briggs (2002), Blommaert and Verschueren (1991), Safran (1999) and Silverstein (2000) for general Western accounts; and Koyama (2003), Lee (1996) and Yasuda (1999), (2000) for discussions in the Japanese context). These studies demonstrate that national languages are not a given fact but an artefact, actively created and spread in order to define the nation. They also highlight the role of language ideology in these processes.

Let us consider a specific example from the debate. Based on the ideol-ogy of language nationalism, Tsuda’s (2003: 221–224) above-mentioned criticism about the three drawbacks of the proposal presupposes that (1) there is a connection between language and the spirit of its speakers, (2) that the Japanese form a homogenous speech community at present and (3) that “English nationalism” can be spread in Japan through the English language. The first assumption would require two principles known as “lin-guistic determinism” and “linguistic relativity” (see Whorf 1956; Gumperz 1996; Pinker 2005 for discussions). While linguistic relativity, that is to say, the idea of uniquely encoded distinctions in any given language, can be widely observed, for instance, with regard to colours, linguistic determin-ism is contested within linguistics. The “strong version” of linguistic de-terminism, that is, the idea of language determining thought, remains an unproved assertion. The “weak version”, i.e., the view that language might influence thought, is not uncontroversial either. Suffice it to point out here, however, that there is no evidence to support statements to the effect that only beautiful Japanese – irrespective of what this actually refers to – guar-antees a beautiful Japanese culture, that a bilingual language regime would endanger Japanese culture or that it would lead to the loss of the basis of thought. The second point, that the Japanese form a homogenous speech community, is no more tenable. Since the 1990s, in particular, many publi-


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cations have undermined the credibility of this notion. It has been convinc-ingly argued that autochthonous language minorities do exist in Japan (Maher 1995), with the Ainu (Siddle 1999), the Ryukyuans (Osumi 2001) and the inhabitants of the Ogasawara Islands (Long 2002). Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that, for instance, not all Japanese women speak women’s language (Inoue 1996), not all Japanese are literate (Mashiko 2001) and that not all Japanese are proficient in honorific language (Dickel Dunn 1999). Adding to this, there is a growing awareness of bilingualism in Japan (Goebel Noguchi 2001). With regard to the third point, the spread of “English nationalism” in Japan through the English language, Tsuda seems to fall victim to his own ideological beliefs. Since he presupposes a connection between language and the spirit of its speakers, he is led to as-sume that spreading a specific language entails spreading the spirit of its (national) speakers. Since this idea is based on the strong version of linguis-tic determinism, it must be rejected. Thus, the assumptions on which Tsuda’s criticism is based cannot be upheld. To repeat, it is not that they are wrong which makes these ideas ideological. Rather, they are ideological because they sustain specific interests and reproduce an unequal distribu-tion of power in Japanese society. To a discussion of this point, we will turn next.

Successful language ideologies can only be created and spread by per-sons who are regarded as legitimate language experts (Ammon 1995; Blommaert 1999; Bourdieu 1991). Not surprisingly, therefore, the debate includes attacks on the legitimacy of those involved (see above). It is wor-thy of note in this context that only the proponents came under attack. The reason is simple. The proponents challenge the ideological views and, by implication, the opponents’ authority on linguistic matters. More crucial yet is the fact that by defining their own usage as the model of correct Japanese, the opponents stamp anyone who does not fully control these registers as linguistic outsiders. What is more, they ignore the legitimate interests of such speakers. Recall in this context no’s criticism of Japanese who, as judged against his own language use, do not speak Japanese properly ( no,Morimoto, Suzuki 2000: 275). Nakamura employs a similar strategy, deni-grating the language use of others in order to discredit their views. He criti-cizes the style of the proposal as corrupted due to the abundance of loan-words (Nakamura 2002: 110). The attitudes displayed by no and Naka-mura are crucial because they are not restricted to denigrating their antago-nists. Rather, they are both involved in creating and upholding a linguistic schism in Japanese society on the basis of a standard of correctness which


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they themselves define. While, according to dominant language-ideological beliefs, the Japanese nation is imagined as a community of linguistic equals, the fact that such criticism is possible and not criticized reveals a linguistic schism in the national speech community. Explicitly excluded from the group of “correct” speakers are, in more general terms, what might be called the “linguistic margin”, i.e. dialect speakers, people without tertiary education, the younger generation, linguistic minorities, immigrants and foreign language learners. French sociologist Bourdieu (1991) was among the first to reveal such a hidden linguistic schism within national speech communities. (He certainly was the first to demonstrate how linguistics was involved in reproducing and sustaining this schism.) In view of the fact that only speakers of prestigious registers of a national language are entitled to perform specific speech acts, he noted that “the most frequent form of this speech [popular speech P.H.) is silence” (Bourdieu 1991: 101). In other words, people are silenced in specific speech acts because they lack profi-ciency in the specific register required for the execution of specific speech acts. There is a schism in any larger national speech community and Japan is no exception. The opponents of the official English debate in Japan were driven by the desire to maintain this schism, the specific interests associ-ated with it, and their own exalted position in the Japanese speech commu-nity. In this way, they defeated their own argument by their linguistic be-haviour.

There is, of course, no homogenous speech community in Japan. Further, the opponents uphold and reproduce a linguistic divide because it serves their own interests; although they probably thought to contribute to linguis-tic and cultural multiplicity, in their defence of Japanese against the on-slaught of English, by invoking the French model which bans foreign words from French. Underlying this view is the idea of the monolingual nation. According to this position, there is no room for French or Japanese if the French or the Japanese speak English. In addition, this view is based on an orthodox linkage between language and nation: the Japanese speak Japanese, the French speak French, the English speak English and so on. Such situations have, however, never existed.

From this point of view, the opponents’ indictment of “linguistic impe-rialism”, “English language rule” and “English language invasion” must sound shallow to the ears of Ryukyuan and Ainu language activists, who have a long history of fighting against the violations of their own linguistic rights in Japan (see De Graaf (2004) on Ainu language rights and Heinrich (2005c) on Ryukyuan language rights). A similar passion for one’s own


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language rights can be ascertained in the view stated in the course of the debate that the imposition of a specific foreign language on all Japanese implies an infringement on people’s liberty. This might indeed be so. How-ever, the same applies for the imposition of Standard Japanese on dialect and minority language speakers. The arguments made by the opponents, in short, reveal an ethical dilemma. It remains unclear why the points raised against English in support of Standard Japanese should not apply for other language varieties or languages in Japan. It remains unclear why the inter-ests of specific groups, to which the opponents belong, should be more important than others.4

The study of language regimes in transformation must address this ideo-logical gap, which has opened up as a consequence of internationalization and emancipation processes. We will turn next to a discussion of what should be involved thereby, and to the lessons which can be learned from the debate on English as a second official language in Japan 2000.

5. Language regimes in transformation

The problem of language planners being biased by their own interests is a long-standing one (Cobarrubias 1983). The dilemma can best be appreci-ated when we consider what is lacking in the debate. Kan (2000) complains that the opportunity to discuss the potential contributions of English to in-ternationalizing Japanese society has been missed. Moreover, in view of increasing immigration from Asia to Japan, the question of whether English is the appropriate candidate for a second official language has not received enough attention. In a similar vein, Yasuda mentions Ainu, Korean, Chi-nese and Portuguese, and asks why everyone should not choose to learn the foreign language they require (Yasuda 2002: 142f.). Mikawa (2001: 194) raises the question of whether an international variety of English or prestig-ious British and American varieties, called “brand English” (burando eigo),should be promoted in Japan. Fumio Inoue (2000) notes the absence from the debate of economic considerations concerning the implementation of the proposal to introduce English as second official language. In addition to these points, further questions can be added:

– Can the ideology of linguistic homogeneity be upheld in an era of internationalization? If not, with what should it be replaced?


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– Can the modern national perception of Japanese self-identity be upheld in an era of internationalization? If not, with what should it be replaced?

– Can monolingual and mono-cultural assumptions be defended in an area of internationalization? If not, with what should they be re-placed?

– Can native speakers continue to claim linguistic authority over their languages when these languages are used internationally? If not, who should have authority over international languages or how can language use devoid of power issues be imagined?

As we have seen, the existing linguistic situation, the requirements of a new language regime and the discursive transformation of the Japanese lan-guage regime involve complex processes. In an internationalizing Japan, the growing influence of English, the growing number of languages being spoken in Japan, the spread of Japanese-as-a-foreign-language, language revitalization and the formation of collective identities through language education are interrelated (Katsuragi 2005; Katsuragi, this volume). These are the issues that a post-modern language regime must take into account. Simply introducing English as an official language is an inadequate re-sponse to these challenges because it only addresses the growing influence of English.

More often than not, controversies in language-ideological debates re-main unresolved. This also holds true for the debate under consideration here (Mikawa 2001: 190).5 In spite of the fact that contentious points have not been settled, the debate has not been in vein. Fumio Inoue (2000) rightly emphasizes that the greatest merit of the debate is that international communication and multilingualism became a topic of discussion in Japan. Such discussion was crucial and overdue. It is safe to assume that intellec-tuals will engage in similar debates wherever new requirements of commu-nication in globalizing environments emerge. In the process of such debates, some arguments in defence of the existing language regimes will become invalid. It can be assumed that the arguments especially at risk are those whose function of sustaining and reproducing unequal power relationships has become visible. It is in this way that language-ideological debates (and meta-debates) play an important and constitutive part in transforming lan-guage regimes. Language regimes are formed discursively. Ultimately, the essential question to be addressed is how language should be imagined in a post-modern globalized world and what modernist elements, views and


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attitudes can be upheld thereby. The debate on English as second official language in Japan gives us some insights into these questions but, admit-tedly, much remains unclear. As we have seen, globalization and interna-tionalization trigger the reproduction of modernist views on national lan-guages. The language ideology behind a new language regime will thus have to incorporate the strong reaction to modernist language ideology that the opponents so vigorously reproduce.

Notes

1. As a matter of fact, the Japanese constitution does not mention language. Hence, Japan does not have an official language. The scheme to introduce English as a second official language would, strictly speaking, have required designating Japanese the first official language. Tanaka (2000a: 45) points out that the status of Japanese as the official language in Japan rests on language ideological consent. He furthermore calls attention to the fact that the concept of official language had developed in multilingual countries of Europe in the 19th century. This concept implied that the state was responsible for commu-nication with the various people in their language. The idea of adapting a for-eign language as an official language in a country which is largely monolin-gual is therefore unique (Tanaka 2000b: 21).

2. It worth noting in this context that a “hundred-year plan” for the spread of Japanese in colonial Taiwan was discussed before 1945 (see Tai 1999 for de-tails).

3. This idea was first proposed by Tokyo University professor of national litera-ture Tsukuru Fujimura in 1940, who argued for the abolition of English lan-guage education in Japanese schools. Shortly afterwards, English language education was indeed basically proscribed until 1945 (see Yasuda 1997: 10-11).

4. In addition, the opponents’ accusation of English “linguistic imperialism” is problematic. There are vast differences between colonization and internation-alization. There also exist vast differences between communication in colo-nies and communication in international settings. Applying the concept of lin-guistic imperialism indiscriminately to both dilutes the concept. What the op-ponents encountered was a link between language and power not supportive of their interests. In other words, linguistic imperialism is always with the other. However, labelling the promotion of international languages and the


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suppression of languages (for examples on Okinawa see Nakamatsu 1996; Oyafuso 1986) with the same term is misleading.

5. This can also be observed in language-ideological debates which took place during the modernization of the Japanese language in the Meiji period (1868-1912). See Heinrich (2005b) for a debate about the emergence of the genbun itchi style (unification of written and spoken language).

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Remains of the day: language orphans and the decline of German as a medical lingua franca in Japan

John Maher

1. Introduction

Languages, like old soldiers, never die. They just fade away. German fades out. English wings in. Japan 2006. The folklinguistic imagination may still, residually, associate doitsugo (German language) as “doctors’ language” but Japanese doctors know otherwise. They know what’s what. The medi-cal community in German-speaking countries like the German bankers of Tokyo also know what’s what. As “cool” usage (Maher 2005) the German language kicks a ball: especially in World Cup year 2006. There is cache’ to be found in German. German banks on the Ginza know this. Jetzt weiss ich, wo es langgeht. And if your local bank manager knows then it’s time you should know. German’s potential to be culturally (aesthetically) inter-esting in Japan is one thing. German’s role as the language of medicine in Japan is another. That the final whistle has blown on German. English in, German out. German in Japanese medicine did not die. It merely faded away.

Medical multilingualism in the sociolinguistic norm in Japan (Maher 1991, 1995). In the workplace, various streams of language (mostly heavy lexical borrowing) have flowed through Japan’s biomedical world. We can summarize this as follows:

Chinese (Internal Medicine) Latin (Anatomy – pre-electron microscopy) Dutch (Internal Medicine) German (Dermatology, Pathology, Psychiatry, Parasitology) English (Public Health) Italian (Battlefield Surgery) French (Toxicology, Jurisprudence)

German language currents flowed unevenly in various medical fields; start-ing in the 19th century. German featured strongly in some branches of

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medicine (e.g. Surgery, Psychopathology) but not in others (Medical Juris-prudence). In some fields (e.g.Toxicology) French was dominant and in other Latin was dominant (Anatomy).

2. The handover from Chinese to Dutch to German

Chinese then German. The world of medicine in Japan has long been di-glossic. Physician Philipp Franz von Siebold found that medical materials were indeed in “another language” (Chinese not Japanese) when advocating a knowledge of German for medical education in Nagasaki, 1823. (Clinical practice at that time, of course, remained in the vernacular. As a medical lingua franca the role of German was, for a long time, second only to Chi-nese.

The use of an additional or second language of communication – in this case Chinese – was so commonplace that those seminal works which intro-duced European (in particular German/Dutch) medicine to Japan were un-intelligible to anyone without a knowledge of Chinese. Seminal medical texts of European medicine in German were routinely translated into Chi-nese; for example, the epochal textbooks: Kaitai Shinsho (New Book of Anatomy 1774) and the Kaitai Yakuzu (Short Atlas of Anatomy 1773) which were translations of the German anatomy text Anatomische Tabellenby Johann Adam Kulmus (Danzig 1772).

Whereas the influence of Latin in European medicine had greatly de-creased by the late 17th century, in Japan at the time and throughout the Tokugawa period until 1871 many schools specifically for Chinese studies were established. The historian Dore observes: “the Chinese language was the royal road and the only road to all knowledge of the period. The classics, the most instructive history, the most refined literature, the most authorita-tive works on military strategy were written in Chinese. So, too, were books on medicine, astronomy, mathematics and law” (1965: 136). ). In the 21st century Chinese is longer literary medspeak. The use of (frequently archaic) written Chinese is restricted to the transmission of high-street Kanpo (Chinese medicine) including chiropractic. Some trained physicians opt to incorporate Chinese medicine in their practice. Some university hos-pitals also employ a large kampo pharmacology, e.g. Keio University Hos-pital, Tokyo. No linguistic drama in the history of medical multilingualism in Japan is more significant than that of Chinese and German. In the 20th

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century, however, it was the German language that dominated the hospitals and laboratories of the nation.

3. German in Japanese medicine

Medical diglossia (German-Japanese) emerged, on the one hand, as a result a series of educational choices concerning the teaching of medicine in Ja-pan’s medical institutions, i.e. the policy to include German as a compul-sory language of study in medical schools (“Education Law on Reform of Imperial Universities”, 1924). In other words, this was a specific policy statement concerning the empowering of German in Japanese medicine by means of decree, statute. On the other hand, the “flowering” of medical German in physician’s jargon, publications and the neighbourhood doctor’s Karte (medical case notes) equates neatly with Coulmas’ notion of “lan-guage regime”: “practices, often unchallenged, which have evolved over time without much deliberate planning” (2005).

In the history of medicine in Japan, German has been an important working language in 4 social domains:

(a) Transmission of scientific knowledge (books), (b) Medical training (German language study in medical school) (c) Clinical practice (the physician’s clinical case notes) (d) Research (literature, publication, nomenclature, nosology).

How can we explain the ascendance of German in particular? That is a winding but intelligible story pertaining to the historical evolution of each medical discipline in Meji-Taisho Periods (20th Century) Japan. Coulmas’ exposition on language regime involves the notion that the regulatory force of such practices is nonetheless undeniable, and in many instances they have profound effects on people’s lives quite beyond language use proper (Coulmas 2005: 8–14). Under the growing influence of German medicine, biomedical writing came more and more to depend upon the German lan-guage, first through translation, then by lexical borrowing of special terms, and later in the adoption of German for the writing of research reports as shown in Figure 1 from the prefectural medical school journal of Kyoto Kyoto Furitsu Ikadaigaku Zasshi between 1927 to 1984.

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Figure 1. Language of articles in Kyoto Furitsu Ikadaigaku Zasshi from 1927 to 1984

A critical language planning decision was made at the end of the 19th cen-tury by the Meiji government. This was the establishment in 1886 of an elective programme of postgraduate study and research at Japanese medical schools leading to the degree Igaku Hakase (Doctor of Science) required researchers to present a Habilitationsschrift, normally in German. Even if articles for submission were not entirely in German it was common practice to submit an abstract in German, as indicated in Figure 2. The climb toward English preference both in articles and the language of abstracts can be seen before the war and in the immediate postwar period.

The postwar era saw the powerful influence exerted by Western, espe-cially North American, scientific research. This was consolidated by such factors as postwar military occupation, enforced changes in education to-wards more English study, and the injection of North American and British culture. As a result, there was an upsurge in the need for linguistic profi-ciency in English among Japanese in many scientific and technological domains, including medicine.

0

20

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%

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Figure 2. Language of abstracts in Kyoto Furitsu Ikadaigaku Zasshi from 1927 to 1984

4. Thinking local, writing global

Japan became one of the world’s leading English-language nations in the field of medical publication (Maher 1984, 1986, 1989). This correlates with the sheer volume of researchers in Japanese bio-medical institutions. Com-pare publication output and researchers at leading medical schools in three countries.

Leading Medical Schools No. of Papers

Researchers Per Head

J. Hopkins 528 3411 0.32 Columbia 386 2127 0.36 Cornell 304 1654 0.37 Oxford 246 489 1.01 Osaka 244 884 0.55 Kyushu 226 480 0.44

Figure 3. Leading university medical schools in 3 countries (USA, UK and Japan) as measured by publication (papers) output

0

20

40

60

80

100

1927

n=86

1937

n=19

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n=87

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n=81

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%

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146 John Maher

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Research typically involves financial support and funding, in turn, this in-volves proper circulation in the professional realm: global rather than local: “The government tell us they didn’t give us 15 million yen of public money in order to publish in Japanese, in our house journal” (Yamamoto, Derma-tologist, personal communication, 2001). There is a correlation between the need/desire for professionals to research and publish and to publish in Eng-lish. Nevertheless, the medical research community in Japan publishes a massive number of papers in Japanese. There are approximately 2.257 do-mestic journals publishing annually on average 110.000 papers in Japanese of which 6.000 (whole) papers are in English (Japana Centra Revue Medica 1995–2005). National medical schools have higher productivity than pri-vate. By annual output (papers) per capita (Faculty-Research Assistants-Graduate Students) the following are ranked the top 10 centres of research in Japan.

1. Kyushu 2.42 2. Osaka 1.95 3. Kyoto 1.89 4. Nagoya 1.67 5. Tohoku 1.54

6. Kumamoto 1.36 7. Kobe 1.34 8. Shimane 1.33 9. Keio 1.31 10. Gifu 1.19

The complementary distribution of the languages of medical research in Japan can be neatly classified between (large scale) basic research which is published in English and (local) clinical research which is published in Japanese. Justification is being made for the maintenance of local-national languages in medical writing. There is a concern that German is no longer needed for transmission of scientific data. However, international attention to German-language publication is high (see below). A significant language shift in medical communication in Japan took place in the 1950s. I desig-nate the 1950s to be, metaphorically, the end of the historical road for Ger-man as a language of medical lingua franca in Japan. That decade saw the last appearance of a German-language publications in Japan’s medial press; for example, the prestigious Acta Scholae Medicinalis Imperialis Univer-sitas in Kioto. The goal of this world-class journal was to present the best of Japanese medical research to the world, Kyoto University being one of Japan’s leading centres of medical science. Journal policy stipulated that contributions by Japanese researchers’ in any European language were


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acceptable. Since Japanese was not a journal language this provides a use-ful means of plotting language preference among European languages only (Figure 4)

5. The end of the road for German

The immediate postwar period saw the end of the road for German as a medical lingua franca in Japan. German language teaching declined in Japanese medical schools. More medical researchers published and con-ducted research in English than ever before. Even at the “clinical end” of professional practice the pressure to know and communicate in English has increased: many of the sick, migrant labourers sitting in the nation’s outpa-tient clinics are now receiving (and asking for) explanation in English. The pressure to communicate in English means that “there simply isn’t any room, any space for the German language in Japanes medicine any more” (Nishizono, Psychiatrist, private communication, 2006).

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Figure 4. Language of article contributions Acta Scholae Medicinalis Imperialis Universitas in Kioto from 1916 to 1967

Whilst German was influential in the modern period, there was consider-able movement towards use of English in the postwar period. Language preference in this publication culminated in English being the only lan-guage of publication in subsequent issues. From that time, also, there were changes in German language curriculum in medical school. Postwar, there is a substantial shift to English as the professional lingua franca of medical publication. Japan is now one of the world’s leading English-language na-tions in the field of medical research publication. The distribution of Japa-nese as a language of medical research can be classified between (large scale) basic research and (local) clinical research. Justification has been

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made for the maintenance of local-national languages in medical writing. Several publications warn that German is no longer needed for transmission of scientific data. However, IF (Impact Factor) studies indicate that interna-tional attention to German-language publication is high.

6. Remains of the day: the language orphans

Pockets of German remain. There are traces even in the journal titles of traditionally German-dependent fields such as surgery although actual con-tributions are in English. Language traces remain in the professional mem-ory of some medical institutions and associations in Japan. These are typi-cally field-dependent. Consider the example of psychopathology. Ni-shizono (private communication, 2006) writes that “Japanese psychopa-thologists are in a time capsule. There are no psychopathologists in Ger-many who depend on German in the way Japanese psychopathologists do. They are like orphans or soldiers abandoned in a foreign territory.” Medical French is more institutionalized in Japan as seen in the Société Franco Ja-ponaise de Médicine which publishes semi-specialist pieces on French-Japanese scientific connections.

Figure 5. Language of article contributions; Archiv fur Japanische Chirurgie from 1925 to 1984

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Likewise joint association such as the German-Japan Orthopaedic Society or the Lymphoma Society maintain an active international liaison.

7. Factors influencing the decline of German

Several factors influence language choice and the decline of German in Japanese medicine. We can summarize these as follows:

7.1. Finance: deletion of German from library collections

Non-English and non-Japanese publication languages are axed. For exam-ple, subscription to the German and French-language journals Nervenarzt,L’Encephale, Annals of Medico- Psychologique were deleted from budget of Keio University Medical Library in 2005.

7.2. Medical training

German has been deleted as a compulsory subject in medical schools. This is both a de-emphasis upon German and also the result of the shift of em-phasis from terminology-medicine to communicative-medicine (English proficiency for medical meetings or medical writing).

7.3. The internationalization of German medicine.

German medicine itself is highly internationalized. German psychiatry, for example, has adopted ‘DSM’ classification of medical illness whereas French psychiatry does not take DSM seriously. Almost all German publi-cations accept papers in English and many publications have converted to English-only. German medical websites are frequently multilingual (Ger-man, English, French, Spanish)

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7.4 Language barrier free Germany

Germany has an “open door” or language barrier free policy regarding re-searchers from overseas in medical establishments in Germany and other German-speaking countries. What does this mean? In other words, a for-eign researcher in the scientific laboratories and halls of Munster or Zurich or Vienna can function freely in English. Nor is there a requirement in most German scholarship for applicants to take a German language test (e.g. Humboldt Scholarships). This contrast with “the French connection” which places constraints on applications: “French language proficiency required” (Huguier 1999).

7.5. Spread of English

The impact of English as a medical lingua franca in Japan has been exten-sively described in Maher (1986, 1991, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004): English as the language of choice in the school/college curriculum, English in medical publication, English as the language of overseas medical study.

7.6. A shift of emphasis to special-purpose medical Japanese

Japan is on the brink of an “explosion” of teaching of Japanese for Special (Medical) Purposes. There will be a re-focus on JSL for English-speakers migrant- medical professionals in Japan (English-speaking nurses from the Philippines); need for General and Specialist Japanese-as-a-language of medicine. According the FTA agreement Filipino nurses and caregivers may work freely in Japan: “medical professionals are already packing their bags in record numbers for the United States, Britain and Japan” (Philip-pines Medical Association, Manila Times 2005, February) where pay and working conditions are often better. “We are really on our way (to a medi-cal crisis),” said Ruth Padilla, president of the Philippine Nurses Associa-tion. “In fact, we are already suffering in the delivery of health services especially in the rural areas, so much so that even doctors now are taking up nursing because they want to leave the country.” Padilla said records from the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency, which processes papers for migrant workers, show the agency has processed 34,415 professional nurses in the last three years. The Philippines produces 8,000 to 16,000


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nursing graduates annually, and this may triple or more in about three years when new nursing colleges begin graduating students. All of these para-medicals (most are English-medium trained) will require considerable Japanese-language training for work in Japan.

8. The empires strike back

There is some anxiety in the medical establishment about the maintenance of the medical vernacular.

– Spanish “Should we continue publishing medical journals in Spanish”? (Sanchez 1999)

– Dutch “Medical science in the Dutch language”. (Walvoort 2000)

– French “Why a scientific medical journal in the French lan-guage”? (Lorette 2001) “A plea for French quality medi-cal review”. (Huguier 1999)

Likewise, several publications warn that German is no longer needed for transmission of scientific data. However, IF (Impact Factor) studies indi-cate that international attention to German-language publication is high as shown in the citations of German language publications in Anglo-American journals. Put simply, German research is prestigious and researchers around the world will get it whether it is written in German or another language. Therefore, on the one hand we see that the IF of Anglo-American journals is high since English is now the predominant communication language of the medical sciences in 3 German-speaking countries (German, Austria, Switzerland). At the same time, international attention paid to German-language journals (by citation frequency) is remarkably high. “English has not supplanted the German language” conclude medical researchers in Germany (Winkmann et al. 2002).

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the maintenance of vernaculars in medical publication. The argument for the retention of the vernaculars is bolstered by what I term the “Quebec argument”; an argu-ment frequently advanced by doctors in French-speaking Canada. Namely, “We doctors are paid by the taxpayers. The people have a right to read our findings in the local language (French)” (2005). Professional exchange continues; often based upon historical ties. As in the above, the historical

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reliance of Japanese research on German pathology is well-known. Con-sider this comment by Walvoort advocating the use of Dutch: “Medical researchers consider a publication in English to be of a higher standard than one in a local language such as Dutch. An international publication in Eng-lish is appropriate when the readers addressed belong to an international scientific community, but the mere fact that a publication is in English is no indication of its importance. Research of a national scope and of national consequences should be published in the national native language. In addi-tion the use of the mother tongue allows deeper and more balanced thought in comparison to the use of a second language. The application of study results in clinical practice in the Netherlands is enhanced by their publica-tion in Dutch, as is the national recognition of the research group. Finally, articles in Dutch provide all of the Dutch clinicians with the opportunity to read original scientific work and not via a (popular) translation. This con-tributes to science-based clinical medicine in the Netherlands” (Walvoort 2000: 283).

9. Closing

German is functionally obsolete as a language of medical publication and language of study in the medical school curriculum in Japan. There are no longer any German-dependent branches of medicine. German medical re-search is highly internationalized and employs English for scientific com-munication purposes. There is heavy domestic use of Japanese (clinical). Research is highly internationalized with high productivity. Institutions in Japan which publish in English (prestigious journals) are equal to leading universities in North America and Europe. Change of emphasis from “lan-guage study” to “medical communication skills”: DP and Meeting Presen-tation. Several factors such as demographic change, labour market will likely change language usage in medical practice in Japan.

References

Coulmas, Florian 2005 Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.


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Dore, Ronald 1965 Education in Tokugawa Japan. London: Routledge.

Huguier, M. 1999 A plea for French quality medical reviews. Chirurgie 124 (5): 473–

475. Lorette, G.

2000 Why a scientific medical journal in the French language? Rev Stoma-tol Chir Maxillofac 101 (6): 283–284.

Maher, John and Yashiro, Kyoko (eds.) 1991 Bilingualism in Japan (in Japanese). Tokyo: Kenkyusha. 1995 Multilingual Japan. Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Maher, John 1984 Review of Strevens’s English as an International Language. Applied

Linguistics Vol.5: 4–9. 1986 English as an International Language of Medicine. Applied Linguis-

tics Vol. 8: 34–35. 1989 Language Use and Preference in Japanese Medical Communication.

In Working with Language, Coleman, Hywel (ed.), 299–316. (Contributions to the Sociology of Language [CSL] 52.)

Sanchez, M-Y. 1999 Should we continue publishing medical journals in Spanish? Ann

Dermatol Venereol 126 (11): 837. Walvoort, H.C.

1997 Medical science in the Dutch language. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 4, 141 (1): 5–7.

Winkmann, G., Schlutius, S., Schweim, H.-G. 2002 Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 127(4): 138-143.

The case for choice – language preferences in Japanese academic publishing

Florian Coulmas

1. Introduction

In this paper I want to do two things. First, I shall give a brief outline of what I think are essential notions for an understanding of changing lan-guage regimes. In the second part, I shall discuss as a specific example the publication practice of Tokyo University.

Language choice, it can be argued, is both the exercise of personal free-dom and the collective response to certain conditions that make some choices more likely than others. Where language choice is possible at all, it is rarely the case that all options are equally likely, desirable, practical, or rational. Choices can be difficult, but not usually in the way exemplified by Buridan’s ass. Placed equidistant between two equally wonderful piles of hay, it starved to death because it couldn’t make a choice. This is excep-tional, for, more commonly, choice implies inequality. This is certainly true for choice in language and choice of language. Unless we concern our-selves with the highly abstract notions of universal grammar, we assume that languages are different and that the elements of language use, ranging from articulatory nuances to entire texts, are different. If we want to believe that choice makes a difference, we have to assume that the options are not the same. This is both an objective statement about the universe of linguis-tic choices and a subjective statement about the agents who do the choosing.

For instance, ostentatious differs from showy because both words sound different and mean slightly different things. But they are also different be-cause Mary prefers to say ostentatious, while John would rather say showy,and no doubt for some reason. John may be an energy-conserving type, preferring showy because it is shorter than ostentatious, and Mary may have a liking for ostentatious words or, perhaps, tends to avoid initial spi-rants because she has a slight stammer. Or perhaps John is 17 and Mary 70, and most 70-year-olds are more likely to say ostentatious than showy. Or maybe Mary went to a boarding school and John did not.

The important thing is that choice in language can be explained; at least that is what we assume. It counts as an explanation if we can demonstrate a

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causality between two phenomena and produce statements of the form “X because Y”. We would not want to say, for example, “Mary said ostenta-tious for no particular reason.” Rather, assuming that Mary is a normal human being, she chose to say ostentatious rather than something else. Every utterance is the result of choice influencing other choices in turn because, as they speak, speakers are part of a giant feedback loop; because tout se tient; because one thing leads to another; and because people cannot but choose their words if they want to say anything at all. Saying something rather than nothing is a choice.

I have argued at some length (Coulmas 2005) that choice is what is to be explained in language generally and what should be the pivotal notion of a theory of language and society. I am avoiding the terms “sociolinguistics” and “sociology of language” because I mean both, plus language planning and language policy. Language planning is all about choice. The very idea of language planning is based on the assumption that it is desirable and possible to influence the linguistic choices made by individuals and groups. Since language use is an important form of human behaviour, it stands to reason that it can be evaluated and made subject to political demands. Evaluation and political decision making do not happen in a vacuum; and this is where things become interesting, because if we want to explain a particular choice, that is, a particular decision to use a certain phrase or a certain language, then we have to examine the factors that have a bearing on such decision.

Even if we confine our considerations to the social dimension of lan-guage, the task is huge, for the social forces that act on the individual speaker are diverse and complex; in the unlikely event that an exhaustive list of such factors could be compiled, we would not even have begun to understand how individual choices coalesce to form social tendencies, that is, shifts in collective language behaviour. What is clear is that only indi-viduals can choose and that they do so in a social environment. No need to pretend ignorance. Many of the relevant factors are well known, such as the standard social variables of class, education, occupation, sex, age, ethnicity, network density, to name the most important ones. However, these factors are not equally significant at all times. Their weight varies not just from one speaker to another, but also from one speech occasion to another. This is another way of saying that linguistic choice is subject to variable con-straints, and it is these constraints that a theory of language choice (which, I would like to argue, is coterminous with a theory of language and society) has to come to grips with. The basic question is, “why do people speak as

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they do?”, and, since so much communication takes place in the written mode, we should add, “why do they write as they do?”

2. Default choice

So this is our point of departure, and the starting assumption is that the general question “Why do people speak and write as they do?” can be an-swered, at least in part. In many situations the answer to this question is so obvious that most people wouldn’t consider it a question at all. That, then, is the default choice. Most people do not perceive it as a choice; but it is a choice all the same, for alternative options, however unlikely, are possible. If speakers, for lack of competence, are unable to choose another language, they still have a choice of varieties, registers and styles and a range of ex-pressions at their command.

The default choice in any communication means that speakers do what is expected of them, sidestepping a “real choice”, that is, one that does not conform to expectations. People make unexpected choices all the time. In a sense unexpected choices are more interesting than default choices, because the latter are self-explanatory. They do not require an explanation, because there is a very strong general assumption that most people avoid standing out. While the range of choices that count as default may be wider or nar-rower in one society than in another, to a greater or lesser extent all socie-ties function on the basis of this principle. However, there is also change, which means both that people do not always make the default choice and that, to the extent that they deviate from the default, the default itself changes.

For example, in scientific communication in the German-speaking world German used to be the default choice, both in speech and in writing. This is no longer the case (Pörksen 2005). In some disciplines, especially the natural sciences and economics, English has become all but the default choice, at least in writing. In certain new disciplines the German language is relegated to second place from the very beginning. Take for instance the German Society for Online Research. Its 2005 conference took place in Zurich, attended virtually exclusively by German-speaking scholars. Yet, the conference and the proceedings were in English.1 Or take the congress on Environment and Science – Concepts and Strategic Goals for the Future,held on 9–11 April 2005 at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. Since this was a government-sponsored event within

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the Germany-in-Japan Year 2005/06, simultaneous interpretation in Ger-man, English and Japanese was provided, but the programme was bilingual English-Japanese.

Some people get upset about what they consider a forced retreat of German from the domain of science2. What I find more interesting is the question of why it happens. There is no government that forces or even encourages people to publish their papers in English rather than in German, and behind every paper is an individual decision to publish it in one lan-guage rather than another. Arguably, the circumstances, to use a noncom-mittal term, favour English. This may be so, but then I’m not saying that decisions are made in the void or that choice is free. Rather, there are all sorts of constraints, and it is these constraints that must be investigated. Four kinds of constraints can be distinguished:

– biographical constraints, – social constraints, – institutional constraints, and – international constraints.

Biographical constraints have to do with place of birth, schooling, aca-demic background and personal abilities. Social constraints relate to peer pressure, societal norms, networks and hierarchies. In institutional con-straints social practices have been given an institutional framework, such as a school curriculum, rules of procedure, a scholarly society, or a publishing company. And, finally, international constraints on language choice con-cern language status, power and aggregated measures of the strength of the speech communities involved.

It is both well known and noteworthy that German is not the only lan-guage that is on the retreat in the domain of science. It shares this fate with virtually all languages that ever attained the degree of standardization and terminological elaboration indispensable for scientific communication. Japanese is one of them. The factors favouring the advance of English have been identified repeatedly: economy of scale (Coulmas 1992, Vaillancourt 1991, Dhir and Savage 2002), including the sheer size of the Anglophone scientific market (Ammon 2001); political clout (Pennycook 1994, Phil-lipson 1992); and prestige. Dixon (1997) emphasizes the fact that through-out the world, people favour the prestige language of the area, thereby less-ening the currency of non-prestige languages. “If things don’t change, the ultimate end to the period of linguistic punctuation that we are now in will


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be a single world language – that which has the greatest prestige” (Dixon 1997: 148). Arguably, the world has become an integrated area, at least as far as science is concerned, so that the prestige gradient of languages be-comes meaningful on a global scale. Along similar lines some scholars have developed models to capture the decline of second-tier languages in terms of an evolving global system (cf., e.g., Gunaratne 2003, Swaan 2001, Maurais and Morris 2001). If a world system of languages actually exists and not just in the heads of system theoreticians, it would mean that lan-guage choices more or less everywhere are affected by it. Theoretically, this case can be made, although it would be an illusion to think “the sys-tem” determines every single act of linguistic choice. The system itself is evolving, which means that constraints on language choice change, and that default choices change. Consider the position of Japanese in the world.

3. Japanese as the default choice in science and politics

For some decades since the end of World War II, the ideology of Japan being monolingual and monoethnic has been relatively strong in the coun-try; however, as a matter of fact, the Japanese language regime is a good example of the cogency of the theory of choice. Japanese has been the de-fault choice in all higher communication domains in Japan for only a rela-tively short time. Prior to the Meiji reforms beginning in the late 1860s, Japanese was used alongside Classical Chinese and various bastardized forms of both for different kinds of writing, the prestige gradient generally favouring Chinese. For non-Chinese outside contacts, the Japanese used Dutch, the language of the only power they permitted a trading foothold in the west of the country. Japanese, Chinese and Dutch were the key ele-ments of Japan’s language regime until the 1860s. Then, behind the smoke of the American gunboats that opened Japan up for trade, English burst onto the scene.

At the time it wasn’t clear that English was the language of the future. Rather, its advent in Japan initiated a period of linguistic diversification. Japan’s first diplomatic treaties with English-speaking countries were still mediated through Dutch. As foreign experts were invited to help the Japa-nese along on their way to modernization, their languages were studied arduously by the Japanese; they were heard in university lecture halls and read in classrooms, French and German in particular. In foreign relations, too, the regime shift was keenly felt. While in mid century the Dutch inter-

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preters had a virtual monopoly in Japanese diplomacy, Dutch had been replaced as the most important Western language by century’s end. In 1885 something extraordinary happened.

Until that time, Chinese was the default choice for diplomatic negotia-tions and correspondence in East Asia. However, in 1885, during diplo-matic negotiations with China in the Chinese city of Tianjin, the Meiji en-voys made an unexpected choice. Rather than drafting documents in Chi-nese in order to make Sino-Japanese interactions comprehensible in the East Asian region, It Hirobumi, Japan’s foremost politician at the time, resolved to negotiate in English with Qing official Li Hongzhang at the Tianjin Convention, which provided for the removal from Korea of Chinese and Japanese troops. This is what historian Alexis Dudden has to say about this remarkable choice:

It spoke in a radically different language from anything that had ever been used before in diplomacy between Japan and China. English was the lan-guage of countries with which both Japan and China had difficulties at the time (England and the United States). In short, English was not a comfort-able choice for anyone at the talks, but it was the European language Itknew best. By speaking English, It confirmed Japan’s desire to change forever the order of the regional discourse of power. (Dudden 2005: 55)

And it was not just the discourse of power the Japanese changed, but the order of the region. Japan invalidated China’s long-held position in East Asia as definer of terms, establishing itself as the champion of international law and thus gaining the confidence of the imperial powers that carved up the world between them. In the legal language of Chinese, terms such as “protectorate”, “sovereignty”, “independent state”, “treaty port”, “mandate territory”, among others, had no obvious counterpart. Japan’s political elite understood the power game well. By adopting a new vocabulary of power, they helped to transform international relations in East Asia, which for Japan itself meant a dramatic makeover from a potential prey to Western imperialism to an imperial power in its own right. It and his men were shrewd diplomats who understood both the language of power and the power of language. Western law and international law, to the extent that it existed at the time, were phrased in Western languages, French and English in particular. If Japan was to engage in the power politics of the day, and participate in shaping the international order to its advantage, these lan-guages had to be mastered.


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No one forced It Hirobumi to negotiate the Tjanjin Convention in Eng-lish. It was his considered choice to do so; a very consequential choice indeed. Perhaps this is a somewhat extraordinary example, but it illustrates well the complex motivations and potentially far-reaching consequences of language choice. If we consider this case in terms of the four kinds of con-straints I mentioned earlier, it appears (1) that It ’s choice was not hindered by biographical constraints; he could speak English. (2) In the event, social constraints did not weigh heavily because an international negotiation hap-pens outside regular social arenas. (3) There were rather strong institutional constraints disfavouring It ’s choice, in that it went against established practice, but the Japanese were powerful enough to override these con-straints, or, conversely, the Qing officials were too weak to insist on what used to be the default choice. (4) The increasing presence of Western pow-ers and their meddling in East Asian politics changed international con-straints on language choice in favour of Western languages. It ’s choice can be framed in these terms.

The negotiation of the Tjanjin Convention in English was paradigmatic for the shift towards English that the Japanese government of the time pro-moted in certain domains, especially education. In a text of 1911 Natsume S seki (1867–1916), Japan’s foremost novelist, recalls his own school ca-reer.

In my generation, all instruction at regular schools was in English. In all courses – geography, history, mathematics, botany and biology – we used foreign-language textbooks. Most students just before us even filled in the answer sheets in English. (Natsume S seki 1996: 391)

S seki was at ease with English and became an English teacher, but reflect-ing on the educational system in retrospect he was discontent.

It invokes in us the feeling that we are no different from India, that we are subjects of England. […] To the extent that the foundations of our nation’s survival are strengthened, the educational system mentioned above will naturally fall into disuse. […] The reason for the declining proficiency in English lies there. (Natsume S seki 392)

S seki argued that science is universal and in Japan should be taught in Japanese. In his time this was not a matter of course because many still needed to be convinced that “Western” scientific notions could be ade-

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quately expressed in Japanese. Yet, S seki and those who shared his views prevailed and Japanese did become the major vehicle of education in all fields. One of the issues he raised by comparing Japan with India is the “colonization of the mind”, which he thought it was necessary to avert in the best interests of the nation. The arguments about this question – does the language scientists work with really influence the way they see and analyse the world? – are at best inconclusive and the battle between advo-cates and opponents of English as Japan’s language of education goes on.3At the beginning of the 20th century, after a generation of students had been educated in English, Japanese bounced back. A century and two world wars later, conditions are quite different, but the problem of the linguistic divi-sion of labour is once again an issue that commands the attention of Japa-nese educationalists, politicians and intellectuals. And it is an issue con-cerning the actual language choice of individual scholars both in teaching and in publishing. In what follows, a small segment of academic publishing in Japan is investigated from this point of view.

4. Academic publishing in Japan: the case of Tokyo University

Japanese has been an all-purpose language for all communication domains for only a relatively short period of time, about a century. As mentioned, modern science when first introduced to Japan was a domain where West-ern languages played an important role both for the articulation of scientific thought and as a source of lexical enrichment. In our day, there is once again a tendency towards a double-track approach in scientific communica-tion; only this time around it is not Japanese plus a multiplicity of Western languages, but just Japanese and English. International scholar-to-scholar communication is overwhelmingly in English, and in certain fields English has also made inroads domestically. However, gaining a clear idea of what the situation is actually like is not so easy. In order to contribute a little to this endeavour I have looked at the publication practice of Tokyo Univer-sity, the country’s most prestigious and important university.

I have inspected all periodicals published by Tokyo University faculties, departments and research installations, 67 in all, over a period of about 25 years from 1980 to 2005. I have to say “about 25 years” because not all of the periodicals were continuously published over the entire period, some ceased to exist, others were newly founded and yet others were renamed. However, it is common practice in Japanese universities that departments


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have their own journals, annual or half-year reports or irregular research papers. These are not the most prestigious publications, but in the case of Tokyo University they carry some weight. Tokyo University professors and their students consider themselves, and are considered by others, with some justification, the elite of Japan’s scholarly elite. They maintain contacts with many universities abroad and enrol a large number of foreign stu-dents.4 Internationalization has been a key term of educational reform for some time, with noticeable effects. Is this reflected in the publication prac-tice of the university?

5. Procedure

By way of providing a partial answer to this question, I have examined the periodicals for the languages chosen by the authors of each article. There were 8,431 articles in the 67 periodicals from 1980 to 2005, with an annual average of 337 articles as the total output of Tokyo University published papers, which amounts to a mean of a bit more than five articles per journal issue.

The data were tabulated broken down for periodicals, for faculties, for languages and for authors’ nationality or rather first language, as exempli-fied in Table 1. It was furthermore recorded whether an article has one, two or several authors and, in the latter event, whether the co-authors were Japanese and/or non-Japanese.

6. Methodological problems

Authors’ fist languages were inferred on the basis of their names. Thus Japanese was assumed to be the native language of Tanaka Ichir , and Marianne LeBon was counted as a native speaker of French, etc. Complete accuracy could of course only be established by directly asking the authors, but for this survey such a procedure was impractical and unnecessary, for the margin of error, if any, is undoubtedly negligible. Information about authors’ first language was sought in order not only to assess the extent to which Tokyo University publications include non-Japanese authors and languages other than Japanese, but also to ascertain the cross section of these two sets which at the same time reveals the extent to which Japanese authors use languages other than Japanese and non-Japanese authors use Japanese.

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Table 1. Faculty of Letters, total number of articles, languages and authors

JJS JJA JFA JFF EJA EJJ EFA EFF 1980 15 E 1, F 8, G 1 E 1, G 2 1981 50 1 E 9, G 1 1982 63 1 E 4, F 2, G 1, P 1 E 5, G 1 1983 88 2 1 E 7, F 1, G 2 E 1, F 2 1984 47 E 4, F 2, G 3 G 2 1985 66 E 5, F3, G 4 E 1 F 1, G 1 1986 65 E 4, F 1, G3 G 2 1987 82 2 E 8, F 2, G2 F 2, G 1 1988 67 2 E 9, F 1, G 5 E 1, G 2 E 1 1989 73 1 E 7, F 1, G 1 E 4, F 2 1990 60 4 E 7, F 1, G 4 G 6, R 1 1991 81 2 E 10, D 4 F 2, G 1, R 1 1992 60 1 E 10, F 2, G 3, R 1 G 4 1993 70 1 E 12, G1 E 4, F 1, G 2 1994 45 1 1 E 4, G 4 G 2 1995 141 1 2 E 18, G 6, R 3 E 3, F 1, G 1 1996 83 4 2 1 E 10, F 7, G 7, R 1 E 4, R 1 1997 84 2 3 1 E 13, G 1 E 5, G 1, R 2 1998 73 1 3 1 E 10, G 4 G 2, R 2 1999 48 1 2 E 6, G 1 E 2 2000 76 3 2 E 14, F 1, G 1 E 4, F 1, G 1,

R 2 2001 64 2 9 E 10, G 2 E 1 F 1 2002 83 2 10 2 E 11, G 8, R 1 R 1 2003 58 11 E 13, G 8 E 1 2004 23 4 2 E 11, G 13 E 2

JJS = Japanese, single Japanese author JJA = Japanese, joint Japanese authors JFA = Japanese, single foreign author JFF = Japanese, joint foreign authors EJA = European language, single Japanese author EJJ = European language, joint Japanese authors EFA = European language, single foreign author EFF = European language, joint foreign authors E = English, F = French, G = German, R = Russian, P= Portuguese


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If a periodical was discontinued and another one came in its place in the same department or institute, it was counted as the same publication. This was not possible where new periodicals were started, sometimes in con-junction with the establishment of a new department. Thus, the number of periodicals per year varies slightly. This relativizes the validity of state-ments about long-term trends.

7. Results

The data show marked differences between faculties. As one would expect, both the extent and variety of foreign language use in the Faculty of Agri-culture is less than in the Faculty of Letters. The only foreign language used in the periodicals of the Faculty of Agriculture is English, while the periodicals of the Faculty of Letters (Table 1) include articles in English, French, German and Russian. The Faculty of Education is even more di-verse, including in addition to these also Italian and Spanish. As one might expect, the Faculty of Science is English-dominant, Japanese ranking third, behind French (Table 2). Only in the four years from 1988 to 1991 were there six Japanese-language publications; the remainder of the faculty’s output was in English plus a few French publications, which can probably be explained by a French-Japanese inter-laboratory cooperation project sponsored by CNRS. It is noteworthy that while the total output of the Fac-ulty of Science varies between 89 papers in 1981, the most productive year, and 12 papers in 1994, the language distribution pattern shows no change. The overwhelming dominance of English was already established in the mid 1980s. The Faculty of Engineering exhibits similar tendencies, al-though the ratio of English and Japanese papers is more balanced; again no significant change over time can be detected.

In some cases, such change does occur. For instance, in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology the number of English papers in-creased suddenly in 2002, a shift that must be attributed to the reorganiza-tion of the school rather than to an incremental shift towards English. The sum of the data across faculties and departments does not support the hy-pothesis that in publishing its research results Tokyo University has shifted from Japanese to English during the past quarter century. The time curve of language choices exhibits some rather erratic peaks, but no significant rise of English (Figure 1); rather, the ratio of Japanese articles was 57.8% in 1980, as compared to 66.6% in 2004. During the same period, the ratio of English-language articles thus fell from 42.2% to 33.4%.

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Table 2. Faculty of Science, total number of articles, languages and authors

JJS JJA JFA JFF EJA EJJ EFA EFF 1980 E 29 E 6 1981 E 59, F 2 E 12 E 11, F 1 E 4 1982 E 34 E 14 E 11, F 1 E 4 1983 E 29 E 7 E 1 1984 E 30 E 7 E 5 1985 E 24, F 1 E 1E 8 E 2, F 1 E 1 1986 E 20 E 11 E 4 E 2 1987 E 32, F 1 E 7 E 4 E 4, F 1 1988 2 E 26 E 12, F1 E 2 E 1E 3 1989 1 E 29 E 8 E 10, F 3 E 7 1990 1 E 25 E 14 E 8 E 7 1991 2 E 17 E 14, F 1 E 3, F 1 E 1 1992 E 23, F 1 E 12 E 5 E 3 1993 E 30 E 14 E 2 E 5 1994 E 6 E 2 E 4 1995 E 9 E 1 E 6, F 1 E 4 1996 E 19 E 4 E 5, F 1 E 2 1997 E 15 E 2 E 1 E 3 1998 E 10 E 3 E 4 E 3 1999 E 8 E 1 E 4 E 2 2000 2001 E 17 E 1E 3 E 5, F 1 E 4 2002 E 12 E 2 E 2, F 1 E 1 2003 E 15 E 2 E 7 E 3 2004 E 9 E 1 E 6 E 1 2005 E 2 E 1 E 1 E 1

JJS = Japanese, single Japanese author JJA = Japanese, joint Japanese authors JFA = Japanese, single foreign author JFF = Japanese, joint foreign authors EJA = European language, single Japanese author EJJ = European language, joint Japanese authors EFA = European language, single foreign author EFF = European language, joint foreign authors E = English, F = French, G = German, R = Russian, P= Portuguese


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Table 3. Total of Japanese and foreign language articles, 1980 – 2004

Year J J %

Foreign: E, F, D, R.... Foreign total

Foreign % Grand total

1980 137 57,8 % E 84, F 10, G 5, R 1 100 42,2 % 237 1981 179 55,4 % E 138, F 4, G 2 144 44,6 % 323 1982 208 63,2 % E 108, F 4, G 8, P 1 121 36,8 % 329 1983 213 70,3 % E 81, F 4, G 4, Ch 1 90 29,7 % 303 1984 145 60,4 % E 82, F 3, G 10 95 39,6 % 240 1985 191 68,0 % E 74, F 7, G 9 90 32,0 % 281 1986 164 65,9 % E 70, F 4, G 6, I 1, Ch 4 85 34.1 % 249 1987 176 67,4 % E 75, F 7, G 3 85 32,6 % 261 1988 181 67,4 % E 78, F 5, G 5 88 32,7 % 269 1989 192 64,9 % E 92, F 9, G 3 104 35,1 % 296 1990 183 64,0 % E 87, F 2, G 13, R 1 103 36,0 % 286 1991 193 63,7 % E 96, F 6, G 6, R 1, S 1 110 36,3 % 303 1992 251 67,8 % E 100, F 6, G 8, R 4, S 1 119 32,2 % 370 1993 242 72,0 % E 85, F 2, G 3, S 1, Ch 3 94 28,0 % 336 1994 224 79,2 % E 45, F 2, G 9, R 1, S 2 59 20,8 % 283 1995 314 80,1 % E 60, F 4, G 8, R 4, S 1,

G 1 78 19,9 % 392

1996 318 77,6 % E 71, F 3, G 14, R 2, S 2 92 22,4 % 410 1997 320 79,4 % E 73, F 2, G 5, R 2, S 1 83 20,6 % 403 1998 324 81,8 % E 59, F 1, G8, R 2, S 2 72 18,2 % 396 1999 298 85,9 % E 41, F 1, G 6, S 1 49 14,1 % 347 2000 353 85,1 % E 50, F 5, G 5, R 2 62 14,9 % 415 2001 320 80,6 % E 66, F 4, G 7 77 19,4 % 397 2002 367 70,3 % E 139, F 3, G 10, R 3 155 29,7 % 522 2003 352 76,5 % E 94, F 2, G 10, I 1, Ch

1108 23,5 % 460

2004 215 66,6 % E 90, F 1, G 16, S 1 108 33,4 % 323 E = English, F = French, G = German, R = Russian, P= Portuguese, I = Italian, J = Japanese, S = Spanish, Ch = Chinese, G = Greek

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Total of foreign language articles, 1980 - 2004

0102030405060708090

100110120130140150

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Figure 1.

Total of Japanese and foreign language articles, 1980-2004

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Figure 2.


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8. Discussion

Can we conclude from this that Japanese is after all resilient and will main-tain its place in the domain of science? That would be rash. Such a conclu-sion would only be warranted for the publication activity that is the subject matter of this survey, that is, periodicals issued by Tokyo University. The data do not reveal how far these publications are representative of Japanese academic publishing. Notice also that Tokyo University hosts many inter-national conferences, usually publishing their proceedings in English. Per-haps even more important are the Tokyo University professors who publish in international journals. Are their numbers increasing? Even with the help of international citation indexes this is hard to establish. Occupying the first rank of all non-English-language universities worldwide, Tokyo Univer-sity’s international ranking is very high. However, publications account for just 20 per cent of the aggregate ranking value.

Since Japanese universities have a promotion system, pressure on young academics to publish internationally has not been very strong so far. To put it differently, there have been no strong constraints working against the use of Japanese in academic publishing, except in certain fields. It is probably safe to say that ambitious young scholars will try to make a name for them-selves by getting articles accepted in international journals. However, the impact this will have on academic careers in Japan is still hard to assess. So far, English-language publications were no significant boon in Japan’s aca-demic job market. Yet another point to note is that Tokyo University has its own press. Tokyo University Press is a very small publisher whose interna-tional impact is quite limited. Its publications are overwhelmingly in Japa-nese.

What do these observations leave us with? The Japanese language re-gime where it concerns academia allows for choice, but it seems that de-faults are being redefined. While Japanese is still the expected choice in some fields, others, especially the natural and technical disciplines, are heavily English-oriented. Still, in every single case the author of a scholarly paper has to decide on the language. Due to a number of factors, some of which I have touched upon in this paper, the constraints acting upon au-thors’ and speakers’ decisions are changing, but the fact that they have to calculate the benefits and costs of their choices remains. The responsibility for their choice lies with them, but the conditions of decision making and the interaction of language choice with other aspects of behaviour are highly involved. It is characteristic that individual choices that have a bear-

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ing on the social dimensions of behaviour, such as linguistic choices inevi-tably have, produce consequences some of which are unanticipated and undesired. This may very well be the case in the long run when Japanese is withdrawn by its speakers from certain fields of scientific communication, although at present this does not seem to be the case. Choice is still possible.

Notes

1. The German Society for Online Research maintains a bilingual website. Its address is the German acronym: http://www.dgof.de

2. The crucial argument is that scientific knowledge is fundamentally dependent on discursive exchange. Discourse means language, and hence an influence of language on knowledge generation is assumed. Cf., e.g., Ehlich (2004), Tra-bant (2003), Weinrich (1995).

3. Recent initiatives to teach English in elementary schools have stirred up new controversy. See, e.g., Otsu (2005). Cf. also Deguchi (2005).

4. In 2004, 2,850 foreign students, including graduate students, were enrolled at Tokyo University.

References

Ammon, Ulrich (ed.) 2001 The Dominance of English as a Language of Science: Effects on

Other Languages and Language Communities. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Coulmas, Florian 1992 Language and Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. 2005 Sociolinguistics. The Study of Speakers’ Choices. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press. Deguchi, Masayuki

2005 Genseigakutekina gengo sentaku-ni tsuite. [Language policy in-formed language choice]. Sokendai Journal 7: 42f.

Dhir, Krishna S. and Theresa Savage 2002 The value of a working language. International Journal of the Soci-

ology of Language 158: 1–35.


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Dixon, R.M.W. 1997 The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Dudden, Alexis

2005 Japan’s Colonization of Korea. Discourse and Power. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Ehlich, Konrad 2004 The future of German and other non English languages of academic

communication. In Globalization and the Future of German, Gardt, Andreas and Bernd Hüppauf (eds.), 173–184. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Gunaratne, Shelton A. 2003 Proto-Indo-European expansion, rise of English, and the interna-

tional language order: a humanocentric analysis. International Jour-nal of the Sociology of Language 164: 1–32.

Maurais, Jacques and Michael A. Morris 2001 Géostratégies des langues. Québec: Office de la langue française,

Terminogramme. Natsume S seki

1911 Gogaku y sei h [On language teaching]. S seki zensh dai nij gokan [The complete works of Natsume S seki], edited by Kinnosuke S seki. Tokyo: Iwanami, 391–400.

Otsu, Yukio (ed.) 2005 Sh gak de no eigo ky iku ha hitsuy nai! [Teaching English in

elementary school is not necessary!]. Tokyo: Keio gijuku daigaku shuppankai.

Pennycook, Alistair 1994 The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Lon-

don: Longman. Phillipson, Robert

1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pörksen, Uwe (ed.)

2005 Die Wissenschaft spricht Englisch? Versuch einer Standortbestim-mung. Göttingen: Wallstein.

Swaan, Abram de 2002 Woorden van de wereld. Het mondiale talenstelsel [Words of the

world. The global language System]. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker.

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Trabant, Jürgen 2003 Mithridates im Paradis. Kleine Geschichte des Sprachdenkens.

Munich: C.H. Beck. Vaillancourt, François

1991 The economics of language: theory, empiricism and application to the Asian Pacific. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 2 (1): 29–44.

Weinrich, Harald 1995 Sprache und Wissenschaft. In Linguistik der Wissenschaftssprache,

Kretzenbacher, L. Hein and H. Weinrich (eds.), 3–13. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Tokio or Tokyo? Dschudo or Judo? On writing foreign names1

Elmar Holenstein

Writing in one’s native tongue about a foreign culture creates a wide vari-ety of “orthographical problems.” They are relatively minor problems in comparison to the content that is communicated in written language. The order of magnitude is that of mosquitoes not of elephants. Nevertheless they prick and sting like mosquitoes. Again and again we are vexed by them, as everyone has experienced to the point of exasperation. And that fact is quite easy to understand. The medium is a message. The graphic medium is not different than the phonic medium we use – it, too, is full of messages, intended as well as unintended.

1. Why problems at all?

If we have something to say we want to be understood. The question is who do we want to be understood by? – only by our professional colleagues (then foreign words, including fussy diacritics, are no problem), by an in-terdisciplinary interested audience willing to learn, by consumers of popu-larized science books, or simply by everyone? As authors we rely not only on the knowledge of our readers but also on their willingness to familiarize themselves with different orthographic forms, not merely with those requir-ing reference to a dictionary but also with those that can be understood spontaneously from the context.

As in our manner of speaking, the spelling we choose depends on the readers we are addressing and what we think of them. It also expresses what we think of the subject we are writing about and, as in everything else we do, how we understand ourselves or would like to be understood. When we write about a foreign culture we additionally reveal what we think of it and what we think about our own linguistic and literate culture. Moreover, as in every communication form, the economic and aesthetic aspects of oral and written language also play a role. Human beings are able to make

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things differently, to see them differently, to say and to write them differ-ently. To make a playful use of this ability furthers their creativity.

For linguists these are platitudes. And yet it is amazing how many prob-lems, large and small, seldom coherently thought through, interlingually active people face. It is remarkable, however, how the situation can change within the shortest time imaginable. Despite the tendency towards global standardization, there is no uniformity. Considering the rapid speed of change and the – in psychological and sociological terms – understandable self-interest of the actors, who are all too often also driven by particularistic strivings, this is to be expected.

Among the current multi-cultural and, what is more, globalized condi-tions of life and communication, transcription problems have become more urgent than they might have been in the past. Everything would be easier, (1) if the readers were monolingual, (2) if they never traveled, (3) if they did not participate in international gatherings, not even in sport events, (4) if there were no foreign words in their language (like Chip and Job in Ger-man) that are written as they are in the original language and are not, like other foreign names with the same initial sound, Germanized (i.e. TschiangKai-Schek and Dschoson, English Chiang Kai-shek and Joson), (5) if there were no names and technical terms (such as Vishnu and Yoga or Yen andHiroshima) that every well-read contemporary is familiar with and for whom the usual German spelling in the past (Wischnu and Joga, Jen andHiroschima) now appears strange as a result of becoming used to the inter-national transcription practices, (6) if, furthermore, the border line between specialized and popularized science publications had not become so diffuse and (7) if, finally members of a foreign language and culture never were to read what is written about them. In the event we could adhere to the tran-scription rules of the nineteenth century and just wait until a revision of German spelling rules which are now felt to be disrespectful, particularistic, uneconomic and unaesthetic might receive unanimous support, that is, in-definitely.

Likewise it would all be simpler if the entire readership knew the ortho-graphic forms of all languages and academic disciplines they are con-fronted with. In the event it would be possible to follow the established spellings of individual countries and the standardized forms of all academic disciplines. However as linguistic and, above all, orthographic knowledge is limited, linguae francae and, at a later date, also interlingual scientific terminologies have been used ever since people learned to speak more than one language. When choosing such a language, a balance is sought between

On writing foreign names 175

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“cultural politeness” (we refer to people as they name themselves and use the names they themselves employ for their nation, regions and places) and “reader friendliness” (we choose a written form that can be easily under-stood). In works that are directed to an interdisciplinary or a non-academic readership we therefore avoid using names in a regional language known only to relatively few native speakers and linguists in favor of a lingua franca that is used by those involved as a second language or is at least familiar to some members of the group. Not everyone can be expected to know the Rhaeto-Romanic name of the village (Segl Maria), where Nietzsche spent several summers, if only a decreasing number of its inhabi-tants speak Rhaeto-Romanic, a minority language which according to quan-titative criteria is doomed to disappear, and if all villagers and all historians of philosophy are familiar with the German name (Sils Maria).

2. Graphemic unity or diversity?

It would certainly be advantageous if all languages using the Roman script had a unified written form for proper names and technical terms of lan-guages not using the Roman alphabet. Simply check the information in qualitative and quantitative terms retrieved by an electronic search engine using Tokyo or Baghdad versus Tokio and Bagdad! Or image how many spellings have to be used to find publications on Dostoevski (Dostoevsky, Dostoyevsky, Dostoevskii, Dostoevskij, Dostojewski, etc.). For almost every possible variant, using the letters i, j or y and v or w, entries can be found. Not all relevant spellings of names can be easily traced, especially those of less well-known people and places. The best results are currently made with searches using the transcription forms found in English publications.

Today we are farther away than we were a half a century ago from a unified spelling of the sounds found in all languages with writing systems different from the Roman alphabet – not using the artificial signs of the Association phonétique internationale but using the Roman letters everyone is familiar with and can type by pressing just one key on the keyboard of his or her computer, and only with a reasonable number of diacritic sym-bols. It is unlikely that the Chinese government will adapt their recently (1979) introduced Pinyin transcription system to conform to the transcrip-tion systems used by Indologists, Arabists, and Slavists with their diverse diacritics. The later groups have not been able to agree on a unified set of transcription rules in the last 200 years. It is also unlikely that they will be


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interested in harmonizing their systems with the Pinyin transcription, which, in part, differs considerably from the usual English pronunciation.

Since 2000 the Republic of South Korea has been pushing, to the dis-pleasure of Western Koreanists, their revised Romanization system of the Korean alphabet (Hangeul)2, while North Korea – one may be forgiven for smiling – has retained the McCune-Reischauer system, developed in 1937 by two American graduate students (George McCune and Edwin O. Reis-chauer) and preferred by the majority of Koreanists writing in Western languages. The most laudable change of the revised Romanization system is the elimination of the diacritic breve over the vowels o and u ( , ). It is replaced, however, in an idiosyncratic manner with an e situated before both vowels. The replacement of diacritic marks by digraphs (double let-ters) is currently en vogue. It is appreciated by computer users and all those who use search engines to find information in the Internet. The digraphs Euand eo now found in the name of the famous monk Euicheon (McCune-Reischauer: ich n) are probably not used in any other script.3 One won-ders whether it is conducive to interlingual acceptance if a relatively small language community, such as the Korean (or currently only South Korean), uses similar idiosyncrasies in the Roman transcription of their language sounds as do the well over a billion speakers of Chinese. The fact is that despite all the proclamations of the equality of languages and countries, the saying Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi holds true. Large communities can take liberties that smaller communities should refrain from if they do not want to be ignored. The city government of Seoul underwent this painful experience when they announced on 18 January 2005 a Chinese transcrip-tion for their capital, for which previously there had been none using Chi-nese characters. The government decided on two characters which are read as Shou’er, meaning “first” and also “capital (city).” The official Xinhua news agency in Beijing, “the first capital” of China, and Chinese airlines ignored the demands of the capital of their little neighbor and retained the traditional Chinese name Hancheng. A newspaper in Beijing wrote that the Chinese had the right to decide themselves what name they would use in their language for the Korean city. The mayor of Seoul is against the con-tinued use of Hancheng (Korean reading: Hanseong), because this designa-tion could lead one to believe the city in question is a Chinese city.4

The same choice between (narrow-minded?) political correctness and (open-minded?) cultural politeness on the one hand and one’s own linguis-tic tradition and right to self-determination of expression in one’s own lan-guage on the other, which the Chinese (can) see themselves facing with


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respect to the South Korean capital, is given for the users of Roman letters for the North Korean capital. They have in fact even more alternatives to choose from and more parties and principles to consider. The choices for the North Korean capital are: (1) P’y ngyang (official spelling in North Korea and at the same time the academic orthographic form used by West-ern Koreanists according to the McCune-Reischauer system), (2) Pyongy-ang (a simplified version of the former without diacritical marks, used by the English-language Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia), (3) Pyeongyang(revised Romanization system of the South Korean government), (4) Pjongjang (current, commonly used German spelling) and finally (5) Pjöngjang (traditional German spelling used exclusively by Duden5 andfavored by the German Wikipedia). With this quintilemma in mind, Ger-man speakers might think it best to follow the intrepid Chinese and retain their own German spellings. Unfortunately, however, it is likely that Pjong-jang and Pjöngjang will increasingly be pronounced by Germans just as they are used to saying Pdschongdschang and Pdschöngdschang.

In South Asia there is likewise a choice between political and (so-to-speak) scientific correctness: Indologists and phoneticians do not use w, but only v for South Asian languages. Many, although not all cities, spell their names in official and propagandistic publications with a w. Most current international maps and atlases that are not required to consider historical factors and Sanskrit studies usually follow the form used in the country itself, for example, Gwalior, Maheshwar and not Gvalior, Maheshvar and Polonnaruva.

Those who feel uncomfortable with the linguistic hegemony of English as the global lingua franca vis-à-vis the continental European languages German and French, which decades ago also had the status of “world lan-guages,” at least in the academic world, should keep in mind that the spell-ing of individual phonetic sounds of many more languages and, not to for-get, of many more transcription systems are in accordance with those of English than with those of German and French. Those who write Shanghaiand Tokyo are not only using the “English” spelling6 but also and above all the “official” spelling.7

A question which always arises when rendering languages that use a non-Roman phonetic script (an alphabetic or a syllabic writing system) is: transcription (rendering the pronunciation of a foreign word) or translitera-tion (rendering the indigenous spelling of a foreign word by using the cor-responding letters of the target script)? For non-specialists the transcription showing the pronunciation is generally preferable (Toukyou T ky ,


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Shinbashi Shimbashi). This is particularly valid if an unusual assimila-tion of sounds is to be shown (for example the Arabic article: al-Najafan-Najaf) or if only a specialist can be expected to master the transliteration system, such as the one used for the Tibetan script with its many silent con-sonants (gZhis-ka-rtse Shigatse).

For context-sensitive pronunciation variants of a letter of an alphabetic script kindred with the Roman alphabet there may be reasons for giving preference to the transliteration: Enisei instead of Ienisei, Jenissej or Yenisey; Solov’ev instead of Soloviov, Solovyov or Solowjow. With pronun-ciation variants due to a historical sound shift, which was not changed in a conservative script, a transcription may, on the other hand, be more appro-priate in a contemporary context, for example the Modern Hellenic (Mod-ern Greek) pronunciation of classical Hellenic names: Iraklio on Kriti in-stead of Herakleion on Krete, Mitilini on Lesvos instead of Mytilene onLesbos.

3. Good style

Let us now turn to some special stylistic problems. Since the split-up of Czechoslovakia into two independent states in 1993, the term Tschechei is avoided in public German announcements and in institutional publications that carefully consider matters of style. Almost without controversy, the word Tschechien has arisen in its place. The ending -ei for a country is felt by some to be derogatory. It is not exactly consistent, however, that the other new state, Slovensko, is still generally termed Slowakei. Why not Slowakien in analogy with Slowenien or Slovakia in analogy to Nigeria?The German ending -ien in the name of the African state (Nigerien) is no longer current. The ending -ia, it appears, sounds better than the ending -ien.Furthermore, it has the advantage that it not only concides with the English variant but also with most Romance languages. The fact that English is the Nigerian official language is cited as an argument in favor of the spelling Nigeria. If the proper official or preferred name of the country in question is to be crucial for deciding the names of nations and regions in another language, then one would have to write Slovenija instead of Slowenien.Similarly other names of states and regions ending in -ei shouldquickly be replaced, for instance, Kabylei with Tamurt or Tamurt Idurar (“Land of Mountains”), Mongolei with Monggol Ulus (transliteration) or Mongol Uls (transcription), Türkei with Türkiye, etc.


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A reader without a higher education is probably able to guess what country is meant by Türkiye. Monggol Ulus will cause more problems. Without reference to the context many would be uncertain as to what the term designates – a country or something that has to do with Mongols. A layperson will even have difficulties finding the Berber name Tamurt in an encyclopedia, although for Europeans it is not an unfamiliar country in a distant area whose aspirations for autonomy has not made the news. For languages with a relatively small population or far away from one’s own country, it is best, as mentioned above, to follow an interregional lingua franca and interdisciplinary academic language. It therefore makes sense to replace the terms felt to be derogative with the less disparaging and better sounding names that are used most frequently by the people themselves in international contexts; thus Kabylei with Kabylia and Mongolei with Mon-golia.

In addition to the geographic terms there are still numerous derogatory ethnic terms currently used in German. They do not have a distinguished sound, not for those whom they refer to or for those who use them. In the literature which is dominated by Anglo-American publications the term Khoisan has been employed for some time instead of Hottentots and Bush-men. But it is still common to write Kalmücken (in German) and Golden(e)Horde (in English as well as in German). Why not follow the transcription rules for Russian, the lingua franca in the corresponding areas, and write Kalmyken and Golden Orda? Golden Tent (or Camp) – Mongolian-Turkish Altın Ordu, Russian Zolotaia Orda and Latin Aurea Orda – is the meto-nymic term for the West Mongols on the Volga.

The use of country-specific terms is most advanced with airlines, inter-national sport associations, in atlases that are published in diverse countries with different languages and last but not least on street maps. Airlines fly to Beijing and Moskva and no longer to Peking and Moscow. On the football field it is not Dynamo St. Petersburg or Saint Petersburg, but Dynamo S.Peterburg or Sankt-Peterburg. In addition to politeness and the much-tooted political correctness the reason airlines and sport associations com-ply is no doubt the pressure placed on them by powerful countries; as for interlingual publications it is probably due to mutual obligingness on the part of the contractual partners and simply for economic reasons. On the Europe map published by the ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club/German Automobile Association) you will not find place names such as Florenz, Lüttich and Saragossa or Warschau, Lemberg and Kiew. On the majority of street maps published today the place names appear as lorry


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drivers and tourists will see them on the sign boards “on site”: Firenze, Liège, Zaragoza, Warszawa, L’viv and Kyïv.8

If the change in names is moving too fast for some contemporaries, they may want to recall how rapidly (without withdrawal symptoms) we became used to speaking of Sri Lanka and not Ceylon or Muslims instead of Mu-hammedans. It has only been a few decades. A Swiss individual who out-wardly expresses his regrets and is inwardly enraged that the railways of his country run to Milano and no longer to Mailand can be reminded that he too does not travel by car to Bellenz as his grandparents did but to Bel-linzona. Or what German from the southwest still knows, as his forefathers did, what place Mömpelgard refers to – namely Montbéliard in Franche-Comté alias Freigrafschaft Burgund (Free County of Burgundy) where Georges Cuvier was born, who then studied at the same Karlschule in Stuttgart that Friedrich Schiller did because his city of birth belonged to Württemberg for no less than five centuries?

A zealous adoption of current proper names of cities and countries can also be tricky, however. The name Zaïre introduced in 1971 for Congo-Kinshasa was quickly discarded after the death of the dictator Mobutu. Who can guarantee that the name Myanmar instead of Burma/Birma will outlast the present regime? For the majority of countries from Ellas/Hellas (Greece) and Magyarország (Hungary) in Europe to Misr (Egypt) in North Africa and Filastin (Palestine) in Southwest Asia to Zhongguo (China) and Nihon (Japan) in East Asia there is no need, however, to worry about the longevity of their names.

In general it is to be expected that any transcription might arouse an emotional response. Where there are alternative spellings, every choice will almost unavoidably have something demonstrative about it. A German translator refused to use the spelling Volga with the comment that the “Wolga” was also a German river with the “Wolgadeutschen” living along its banks. What is the best way to write, in the limited space of a map, es-pecially in a historical atlas, the name of a river between two countries? Choosing the more famous name (Yalu) of the larger nation (Zhong-guo/China) or the less well known name (Amnok) of the smaller nation (Hanguk/Korea), whose territory stretched beyond the river over longer periods of history and whose language is still spoken on the other side of the river by a large part of the population? Which of the two official names for a nation do we decide on: the one derived from a river name, a millen-nia-old, foreign geographical designation (India) or a newly created name linked with ethnic associations and religious restoration, not of the entire


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population of the multi-ethnic nation, but only that of its Aryan majority or those who see themselves as such (Bharat)? And aren’t we going too far when we write in German Aryer and arysch following the English spelling and the transcription used by Indologists – (cf. Buddha’s “four noble truths” catv ri rya saty ni) and avoid Arier and arisch because of the racist abuse linked with the traditional German spelling?

It has less to do with political correctness and more with historical cor-rectness that in the past few decades the centuries-old practice of using Latin spellings for Hellenic (alias Greek) names in Western European aca-demic languages is gradually experiencing a re-Hellenization. Increasingly scholars are writing Aisopos instead of Aesopus or Äsop, Athene instead of Athena, Bakchantes instead of Bacchantes and Heliupolis or Helioupolisinstead Heliopolis, as they have been doing for some time now with Platon(instead of Plato). In the non-English literature this re-Hellenization has developed considerably further than in the English literature. There are two explanations for this discrepancy: (1) In the universally dominant lingua franca it is taken for granted that the English spelling is the most wide spread and thus considered more and more to be the canonical form. (2) We are not writing for the ancient Hellenes but for our contemporaries. What is decisive are the reading habits of the targeted audience and their ease in understanding the written page. Historical considerations are seen as less important. Likewise less weight is attached to the willingness to learn and the potential learning interest of the readers. If, however, the most common linguistic usage becomes the absolute guiding principle for transcriptions, this may result in the establishment and acceptance of inadequate ortho-graphic forms and a stagnation of development without consideration of the continuously changing linguistic and extralinguistic context.

Transcription variants, not only of entire names but also of individual foreign sounds, in general carry differing emotional values. Slavists who published in German in the 1920s and 1930s in Praha/Prague, among them the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, felt that the use of Tschechei andTschechoslowakei was objectionable not only because of the ending in -eibut also because of the clumsy series of consonantal letters at the beginning of the word. They avoided the word tschechisch, preferring either echisch(in analogy to esky) or czechisch (in analogy to the Polish and English translations czeski and Czech). Czechs living in German-speaking areas had been using cz for the in their names since the nineteenth century (Ludwig Czech, Jerzy Patoczka; cf. also the Polish-Austrian Czernowitz). The tetra-graph tsch does not have a particularly graceful appearance. With their


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sensitivity these linguists and bearers of Czech names were in good com-pany. Goethe decided for his West-östlicher Divan (nota bene: not “Di-wan”), following the suggestion of his “Orientalistic” advisor J. G. L. Kosegarten, to transcribe Arabic hijra (Muhammad’s “emigration” from Makka/Mecca) using the French spelling hegire instead of the “barbarian” Germanization Hedschre. It is good to be aware of the fact that the spelling we choose can express how we feel about the speakers of another language.

4. Continuous change

Currently in German the traditional bundling of three to four letters for a single consonant in foreign names is, under the influence of English spell-ing, increasingly being reduced to one or two letters (sch sh, dsch jand tsch ch, zh oder cz, depending on the language). Under the influence of Indologists since the nineteenth century this development has advanced the furthest in the transcription of South Asian languages and was inter-rupted only temporarily in the first half of the twentieth century due to the pressure of nationalistic movements.

The Brockhaus encyclopedia no longer writes (as it did in the 1930s) Dschaina instead of Jaina, and Waischeschika instead of Vaisheshika, al-though it still uses both Yoga and Joga (the latter was used exclusively in the 1930s). In the entries Veda and Vedanta it also includes in contrast to Jaina and Vaisheshika the older German spelling Weda and Wedanta.Brockhaus even uses the hybrid spelling Upanishaden (English stem and German ending) instead of the (among philosophers) still current Upanis-chaden. Wikipedia refers to Upanishaden as “the more modern” variant.9

With Chinese names there is even greater confusion. Brockhaus nowonly lists Shang and not Schang for the “oldest historically recorded Chi-nese dynasty” but on the other hand Schanghai (at least with a reference to the “official” spelling, Shanghai) for the “city in East China.” In daily newspapers especially it is not unusual to find in one and the same article “relatively well-known” names (Kanton for Guangzhou) in the old German spelling, while a relatively unknown name (Yangzhou) appears in the offi-cial or English spelling.10

What “relatively well-known” and “relatively unknown” refer to is still surprisingly vague and variable. Art lovers, one would think, might be just as familiar with Kyoto as they are with Tokyo, if not more so. And yet such a notable art publisher as DuMont sells a video cassette entitled “To-


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kio/Kyoto: DuMont on Tour.” Everyone familiar with Japanese knows that the second syllable of T ky and the first of Ky to not only have the same sound but also the same meaning (“capital”). Brockhaus and Duden have two entries for both cities, with only Brockhaus adding the diacritic (mark-ing the length). In the Brockhaus encyclopedia the main articles with de-tailed information appear inconsistently, and for no obvious reason, under Ky to and Tokio.11

In an interim period a hotchpotch of forms is not surprising. Develop-ments in cultural history, regardless of scientific standards, are just like developments in natural history – they do not evolve simultaneously and, what is more, instantaneously. We cannot think of everything all at once.

The mishmash is not limited to East Asia. It is global. In a monograph entitled Islamische Philosophie published by a German Islamicist in 2004 the reader is confronted with the word Schiraz. The trigraph Sch at the be-ginning of the word corresponds to the traditional German spelling (Schiras), the final consonant z is the English spelling of the voiced s (Shi-raz).

Those interested in a consistent approach to the spelling of foreign names in German can at the moment not rely on Duden or Brockhaus and only to a limited degree on the German version of the Internet encyclopae-dia Wikipedia.12 They are advised to refer to recent handbooks for the indi-vidual language and cultural-historical disciplines. While in Duden, Brock-haus and the German Wikipedia the user still finds Slawen and Slawisten,all the German-language Slavic institutes at universities write Slaven and Slavisten, following the international standard and in accordance with the Association phonétique internationale.

Brockhaus writes Kushana (no longer Kuschan as was done in the 1930s), but a page before Kusch (for Kush). Duden, completely preoccu-pied with domestic orthographic problems, is not even consistent with one and the same foreign language. For the river Yangzi the old German spell-ing Jangtse is listed, for the natural philosophic principles Yin and Yangonly the Pinyin transcription, for Shanghai both spellings, whereby as men-tioned above, under the entry Schanghai the “official” spelling Shanghai is referred to. Brockhaus is in general one step ahead of Duden. For the main lemma about the longest Chinese river, with detailed information, Dudenstill uses the traditional German spelling Jangtsekiang, whereas the lemma Yangzi Jiang only contains, except for the helpful and, for most readers necessary, phonetic spelling of the Pinyin Romanization, the information “official Chinese spelling of Jangtsekiang.”


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For the cities in India Duden uses the traditional German spelling except for Varanasi (“previous name”: Benares), with Madras (Tamil: Chennai) located from a Eurocentric point of view “in Vorderasien [Hither or Ante-rior Asia]13”, Kalkutta (Bengali: Kolkata, still, as in the past, English: Cal-cutta) simply “in Indien,” while India itself is located “in Südasien,” and Pakistan just “in Asien.”

Under the influence of English as a global lingua franca there is almost inexorably an increasing adaptation of the English transcription rules: the German ch becomes the English kh (Chanat Khanat), j becomes i (Berd-jajew Berdia[i]ev) or y (Himalaja Himalaya), k becomes c (InkaInca), voiced s becomes z (Sansibar Zanzibar) and w becomes v(Wladimir Vladimir).

In 1972 Indonesia substituted the transcription system introduced by the Dutch colonizers (corresponding partly with the German and partly with the French) for the English system in order to avoid mispronunciation in an English-speaking context (ch kh, dj j, j y, w v). Djajapura be-came Jayapura, Jogjakarta accordingly Yogyakarta and Kawi Kavi. Only the internationally accepted Java (despite its Sanskrit roots: Yava-dvipa = “Barley Island”) was not changed in Western languages to Yava. In Indone-sian (Malaysian) and partially also in Dutch, however, j and w are retained (for example: Jawa Tengah as the “indigenous” term for the province Cen-tral Java).

The Roman letters ch, j and y used in the Pinyin transcription of Chinese are pronounced as if they were English and not German letters. The English written form is in many cases more slender than the German in both the literal and figurative sense. It is shorter (a measurable, economic criterion) and more elegant (possibly a subjective criterion).14

Spelling pronounciation is common. Germans without knowledge of foreign languages regularly pronounce individual letters and combinations of letters in foreign words as if they were German, rather than according to the rules of the source langue: Judo as Yudo and not as Dschudo,15 Chiantias Schianti and not as Khianti, the final syllable of pommes as in the name Hannes, etc. In the context of the increasing number of English loan words and the English transcriptions of foreign names many a reader, however, will no longer be certain whether the remaining German transcriptions are to be read in the traditional German or the English manner. They no longer cling to the usual German pronunciation of individual letters but tend to adapt their pronunciation to the reading of these letters in common English words. Thus the ch in Chaiberpass (for the Khyber Pass) can be heard as


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tsch as in chip, the j in Jarlung (for Yarlung) as dsch in job, the s in Sim-babwe (for Zimbabwe) as an unvoiced s as in set and the w in Wolhynien(for Volyn(ia)) as a gliding u as in web.

One of the consequences of English as – practically speaking – the stan-dard transcription language is that the traditional rule, according to which vowels and consonants are to be pronounced in a Roman transcription as they used to be spoken in the post-classical Latin academic language, is gradually losing its validity. Examples are the extension of c to ch (San-skrit: S ñc Sanchi; Tamil: Cennai Chennai), the replacement of chwith kh (Hellenic: Chios Khios) and of i with e (Amerindian: Na-Diné

Na-Dené), as well as the reduction of th to t (Tibetan: Tholing To-ling).

English is not, of course, the ideal transcription language in every re-spect. That cannot be expected of any single language. It would be advan-tageous to substitute the English digraph kh (and the German ch) in a rever-sion to the Hellenic letter chi (and in analogy to the Cyrillic letter cha de-rived from it) with x (Bakhtin/Bachtin Baxtin) and, in compensation, the Latin x with the digrah ks, as has been partially done in accordance with the phonetic system of the Association phonétique internationale (primarily by Slavists and Russian-oriented scholars in cultural studies): KhazarXazar; Mtskheta/Mzcheta Mtsxeta; Alexander Aleksand(e)r. It would also be more economical to replace the traditional diagraph ph (for the Hel-lenic phi) simply with f, as is done once again in accordance with the inter-national phonetic system in the intercontinental languages Spanish and Portuguese as well as in Italian (filosofia) and Dutch (filosofie) and in many other languages – in German, however, this practice has only been imple-mented to a limited extent and has met with controversy.16

Diacritic marks present considerable difficulties and are an abundant source of mistakes for laypersons. They are used to represent a particular pronunciation of a letter. Immediately understandable for the non-specialist is the macron thanks to its iconic nature (a long horizontal bar over vowels as in T ky ). In publications that have an interdisciplinary readership dia-critic marks – the macron being a prominent exception – are more and more replaced, to the benefit of the readers, with digraphs. The most familiar example is the substitution of by sh ( imla Shimla). Double letters are not only reader-friendly; they are for the time being also computer-friendlier.


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5. Conclusion

All in all, the following might be kept in mind: Eliminating multiple vari-ants of foreign names results, as in every other reduction in the number of synonyms, in a loss of connotations. A consistent transcription principle also makes understanding more difficult in the early phase of usage of an uncustomary written form. But if inconsistency is as wide-spread as it is now in German, this will also contribute to confusion. Furthermore, we should not think it is too late, now at the beginning of the third millennium, to gradually replace spellings – hardly older than two to three hundred years – that are felt to be uneconomical, particularistic, disrespectful and/or inelegant.

Decisive for the choice of spoken and written linguistic structures is the target audience, which today for the most part has at last some passive knowledge of English. This should be taken into consideration when decid-ing that the most common spelling be the canonical one. In fact many peo-ple are more familiar with the English and the official transcriptions pro-moted by other nations for their own language than the traditional German spellings that are often felt to be somewhat old-fashioned. Finally the use of the internationally most common transcription makes it easer for foreign readers to read German-language texts, especially important when the sub-ject of these texts is their own culture. They then find the same spelling for names as in their own tongue or in the international lingua franca. These spellings do not by any means testify purely to political correctness butrather, and above all, to cultural politeness.

Notes

1. Revised and expanded version of two sections from the introduction to the Philosophie-Atlas: Orte und Wege des Denkens, Zurich: Ammann, 2004, the first under the heading Cultural Politeness. An earlier, much shorter version appeared in a special volume on translating for the journal die horen 50, 2005, vol. 2, pp. 220–27. English translation: Anne Heritage.

2. An exception is made for family names where the variation in Korean (also among politicians) is as freewheeling (Lee, Rhee, Yi, I; in Chinese Pinyin: Li) as it is in German for people with former occupational names (Schmid, Schmied, Schmidt, Schmitt etc.). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_ Romanization_ of_Korean


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3. The model appears to be the transcription Seoul (actually Séoul) introduced by French missionaries in the eighteenth century for the capital S ul (older Ger-man spelling: Söul; see note 10). Internationally this form has become the standard for Roman script. Only few non-francophones know that in this tran-scription the e (or é) stands for the in S ul and the following letters ou are to be read together as a digraph for u (as in German und), as is customary in French.

4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul.5. Duden: Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, here quoted, if not otherwise stated,

from the “23rd edition, expanded and completely revised,” Mannheim 2004. (Duden is the standard orthographic dictionary of the German language.)

6. Terminology used in Duden since 2000. 7. Terminology (in German amtlich) used in Brockhaus: Die Enzyklopädie, here

quoted from the “twentieth, revised and updated edition,” Leipzig/Mannheim 1996–99. Up to 1996 Duden used to write postamtlich, i.e.“official postal spelling,” as was customary also for Brockhaus in older editions. Brockhausoccasionally uses the phrase amtlich in lateinischen Buchstaben (“official spelling in Roman letters”).

8. The ADAC Europe Map, Munich, “valid until the end of 2006,” appropriately uses the indigenous spelling of geographic names. I slightly maliciously started to offer this ADAC map to friendly critics and colleagues who are not comfortable with the principle of using the countries’ own spelling in my Phi-losophie-Atlas (see note 1) – with the somewhat impudent comment, vox automobilistarum, vox Dei.

9. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namenskonventionen/Indien 10. In the Internet the old German spelling Jangtschou can still be found. 11. Inconsistency is not limited to the synchronic level. In the Brockhaus edition

of 1934 the main lemma for the Japanese capital is to be found under the heading T ky . In Duden there is on the diachronic axis a bewildering mixture of forms for both Japanese cities. At least the mishmash is restricted to two of a multitude of possible spellings, for today’s capital e.g. Tokyo, Tokio, Tokjo, T ky , Tôkyô, Toukyou, Tohkyoh and so on. Originally Duden used only the spelling Tokio. In the 16th edition of 1969 two spellings (Tokio and Tokyo)are listed, with Tokyo classified as English and marked with the post horn symbol indicating the official postal spelling in Roman letters. In the 17th edi-tion of 1976 the two spellings are treated equally using a double entry (“Tokio or Tokyo” and “Tokyo or Tokio”). The following editions from 1986 to1996 only use one heading (“Tokio”) as in the earlier editions without reference to the English or the official spelling. The 22nd and 23rd editions of 2000 and


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2004 contain once again two lemmata with “Tokio” being the main lemma. A greater number of spellings are listed in Duden for the South Korean capital. The first entry was in 1947: “Söul (capital of Korea).” In 1955 there are two entries: “Soul cf. Seoul” and “Seoul (capital of Korea).” In 1969 we read “Söul or Seoul” with “Seoul” carrying the post horn symbol for the official postal spelling. In 1976 we find exclusively the spelling “Söul”; from 1980 to 1996 there are once again two entries, in 1980 and 1986 “Seoul” and “Söul cf.Seoul.” in 1991 and 1996 “Seoul” and “Sòul and Söul cf. Seoul.” Finally in the editions of 2000 and 2004 only “Seoul” is listed.

12. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namenskonventionen provides a cir-cumspect presentation, worth consulting, of the problems one faces with the transcription of foreign-language names. The editors for individual languages do not consistently follow the same rules, however. The most radical interna-tionalization, i.e. “de-Germanization,” was carried out by the editors for In-dian languages. The most conservative are the editors for Arabic and Slavic languages. They adhere to many traditional Germanizations. – In the general guidelines of Wikipedia it says: “If in the common language usage the Ger-man name is more familiar (for example, Rom, Warschau, Venedig, Elsass), this form should also be used. This is valid, however, only for places above a certain significance.” This advice may make sense in an encyclopedia that ar-ranges its topics in alphabetical order and not following intrinsic criteria. It does not, however, make sense on a map for automobilists or in a historical monograph. But also for an encyclopedia in which the “common linguistic us-age” is the “overall guideline,” one should consider that today many users are just as familiar with the English spelling of foreign names or even more famil-iar than with the traditional German spellings. “Common linguistic usage” is in view of the linguistic variants found today in every dictionary and encyclo-pedia an all too encompassing phrase. It is also advisable to consider that pas-sive linguistic competence is considerably more advanced than active linguis-tic competence. With the phrase “common linguistic usage,” it would also be necessary to differentiate between oral and written usage. One does not “talk like a book.” The written form is in general more formal than the oral. Many people who write Beijing and Roma will continue to use Peking and Rome in conversation. What easily sounds affected or even snobbish in speech appears to be less extravagant in writing.

13. G. W. F. Hegel placed India in „Hinterasien“ („Further or Posterior Asia“; see his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie: Werke in zwanzig Bän-den, vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 215).


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14. I personally find the forms chan (Chinese for zen), Zhuang Zi and Jurchen to be more pleasant, and thus aesthetically more appealing and somehow more gentle than Tschan, Tschuang-tse and Dschurtschen. I have at least a quantita-tive, i.e. objective criterion (the cumulation of consonantal letters) for my evaluation. On the other hand, I am unable to counter the subjective, auditory impression of a participant in an Internet discussion about the German pro-nunciation of Judo (can be found most quickly using the search words “Dschudo, Judo” under the entry “Das Kampfkunstforum Aussprache”). He wrote: “I say Judo with a j [in German pronounced like y in English], sim-ply because it sounds better.” With the Germanized loan word Dschungel(Hindi: Jangal) one tends to find the tetragraph dsch appropriate and the pro-nunciation onomatopoeically fitting in contrast to Dschaina (for Jaina), which was introduced at the same time but now is rarely found.

15. The tetragraph dsch instead of the English j was not maintained in the German transcription of Japanese words in contrast to the transcription of other lan-guages into German. Thus today for Judo one hardly every finds Dschudo.

16. I hesitate to even suggest reserving the letter z in German for the voiced s in analogy not only to English but also to several other languages (cf. Spanish Zaragoza) and numerous scholarly transcription systems (cf. the above men-tioned Shiraz), if one used instead of the traditional German z the digraph ts as is done in several languages (Tsar for Zar). The additional idea – conceivable in a philological ivory tower – of reducing the good old trigraph sch in all German words to the internationally more wide spread diagraph sh for eco-nomical (and aesthetic?) reasons might best be kept to a footnote.

References

Brockhaus 1996–1999 Die Enzyklopädie. Zwanzigste, überarbeitete und aktualisierte

Auflage Leipzig/Mannheim: Brockhaus. Duden

2004 Die deutsche Rechtschreibung. 23., völlig neu bearbeiteten und er-weiterten Auflage, Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1970 Reprint. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie: Werke in

zwanzig Bänden, vol. 12. Original Edition Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1816 ff.

Holenstein, Elmar 2004 Philosophie-Atlas: Orte und Wege des Denkens. Zürich: Ammann.


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http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namenskonventionen http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namenskonventionen/Indien http://www.kampfkunstforum.de/index.php?showtopic=7091

Effects of globalization on minority languages in Europe – focusing on Celtic languages

Kiyoshi Hara

1. The effects of globalization on minority languages

To begin my considerations, I would like to introduce some arguments con-cerning the effects of globalization on minority languages. First of all, I think the opinion of political scientist Saskia Sassen is very relevant to this topic (Sassen 2002). According to her, decentralization started in the 1980s. During that decade, the “small government” theory became a political focus in the US as well as in the UK, and the privatization of the public sector and economic deregulation began. Deregulation gave rise to multinational companies and these companies became holders of power of a global nature, which exceeded the control of nation-states. The increase of migrants, on the other hand, led to network formation of ethnic groups across national boundaries, a trend that is connected with the international protection of human rights. The “small government” theory of the 1980s is directly linked with decentralization and devolution in the 1990s in Britain, France and Japan. This tendency was favourable to the promotion of regional and minority languages.

Another useful argument of Sassen’s is the re-creation of citizenship in global cities in which ethnic groups live, retaining their identities. This citizenship is a kind of re-creation of human rights in the nation-state and is now becoming the basis for the formation of a worldwide network of soli-darity of ethnic groups. This can be labelled “post-national citizenship”. This concept is also favourable to the promotion of minority languages.

French sociologist Michel Wieviorka asserts a “globalization from the bottom” (Wieviorka 2003). George (2004) speaks of “alter-globalization”. Sociologist of religion Roland Robertson (1997) indicates that such “anti-globalism” is taking the position of the critical power which communism held during the Cold War. Robertson holds the view that Western liberal democracies are now entering an “authoritarian phase”, as we see in the Iraq war, and he proclaims a “globalization of consciousness”. For example, environmental protection movements depend on the globalization of con-sciousness. Global democratic thinking is necessary for these movements.

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For democracy, anti-authoritarian activities serve as an index of vitality. In this context, what is interesting is the activity of cross-boundary organiza-tions, i.e., NGOs etc., and the way this activity is connected to the world-wide civil society. The promotion of minority languages can be carried out in this context as well.

Promoter of Scottish autonomy and specialist of community theory Mi-chael Keating insists on the importance of “glocalization” (Keating 2003). This means that the development of local culture is important for globaliza-tion. It is “rooted cosmopolitanism”, and we have to think of local matters as of global ones. Cosmopolitanism is the globalization of consciousness, and is therefore a positive view of globalization. Rooted cosmopolitanism surely includes the promotion of minority languages.

Ruth Lapidoth (2003), a specialist of the autonomy theory of Israel, also has a fruitful opinion. She distinguishes the autonomy of individual (per-sonal) culture from regional political self-government. A true democratic federal state should accept these two kinds of autonomism, especially that of cultures that are not rooted in a territory but in a network of individuals. In this way the cultural specificity of migrant groups would be maintained. No government has as yet realized such a scheme.

2. The 25 member-state EU and official languages

The accession of ten nations to the European Union (EU) in May 2004 gave rise to the recognition of nine new languages as EU official languages. At the time of the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC), only four official languages were recognized, German, French, Dutch and Italian. Danish and English were added in 1973. Ireland joined simultane-ously, but Irish did not become an official language. Greek was accepted in 1981. Portuguese and Spanish were added in 1986, and Finnish and Swed-ish in 1995, after the formation of the EU. In 2004, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Slovakian, Hungarian and Maltese were officially recognized. As for Cyprus, only the southern part in which the Greek community represents the majority joined, but when the northern part in which the Turkish community represents the majority is admitted, Turkish will automatically become an EU official language. The accession of Romania and Bulgaria is planned for 2007. Then, Romanian and Bulgar-ian will also become EU official languages.

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In fact, the EU official languages are not prescribed in basic treaties, such as the Treaty of Rome or the Nice Treaty, nor in the new EU constitu-tion, which is awaiting ratification. There is only an article which specifies the legal languages of treaty in basic treaties. It is prescribed in a regulation (Regulation 1/15/4/1958) that was enforced at the Council of Ministers meeting on 15 April 1958, which says that whenever a new member nation is added, an official language is added at this level (Libarona 2004: 16). That is to say, legally the national language of a member state automati-cally becomes an official language of the EU, and becomes a working lan-guage as well.

But there are exceptional cases: Ireland and Luxembourg. The constitu-tion of Ireland specifies Irish as the first official language and English as a second official language. Therefore, Ireland could have claimed Irish as an official language of the EEC at the time of accession in 1973, but did not do so. The reason seems to be that Irish does not play the role of a public language throughout Ireland. However, the legal translation of a basic treaty was demanded. So Irish has been a “treaty language” since 1973. It is also an official language of the European Court.

Letzebuergisch (the language of Luxembourg) was not the national lan-guage of Luxembourg until 1984, so it was not claimed as an official lan-guage at the time of the foundation of the European Community (EC). In Luxembourg, French and German hold substantial public status, so gener-ally Letzebuergisch is not predicted to become an official language of the EU (Pujadas 2004: 7). It is not a treaty language, either. There is a differ-ence of status on this point, when compared with Irish on the EU level.

There is a big difference between the legal status and the actual condi-tion of use concerning the working languages of the EU. The University of Duisburg in Germany carried out an investigation about the actual condi-tion of the working languages in 1994. According to this, in EU organiza-tions, the languages used in communications with other organizations are as follows. On the oral level, they are 69% in French, 30% in English, 1% in German, and other languages 0.5% or less. For documents, they are 75% in French, 25% in English, and 0.5% or less in German and other languages. Between EU organizations and the EU countries, on an oral level, 54% of communications are made in French, 42% in English, 3% in German and others 1%, and in documents, they are 56% in French, 41% in English, 2% in German and others 1%. In relations between EU organizations and coun-tries outside the EU, on an oral level, they are 30% in French, 69% in Eng-lish, 1% in German and others 0.5% or less. In written form, they are 28%

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in French, 71% in English, 1% in German, and others 0.5% or less (Ó Riagáin 2002: 24). That is, the main working languages are French and English. It seems that French manages to keep its pre-eminent position at a time of worldwide English proliferation. What is important also is the sharp decrease in German. After the results of the study became known, the Ger-man government intensified its lobbying activities for German in the EU Parliament and other EU institutions.

However, there is an opinion that working languages must be limited in number, and not extended to all official languages of the EU at the time of the expansion of the union. However, in February 2001 a poll conducted by the Euro Barometer revealed 38% support for the use of a single working language in the expanded EU, while those opposed to this idea totalled 47%. Public opinion thus supports the maintenance of linguistic diversity.

According to the “Report of the special committee of the French Na-tional Assembly for linguistic diversity of EU” (Herbillon 2003), multilin-gual conditions are well maintained in EU organizations.

In 2003, 1,150 persons were engaged in translation, and interpreters were engaged in the European Parliament 56,000 times; 13 million pages are translated in EU committees every year. For the EU Commission, the Council of Ministers, the Economic and Social Council, and the Committee of Regions included, 700 interpreters are needed under present conditions per day every year. Interpreters are paid 625 euros (about 87,000 yen) per day, per person and the multilingual related expense in the European Par-liament amounts to 274 million euros (30% of the administrative budget). Of course, if such operational expenses are compared with the budget of whole EU, it appears rather a small amount. It accounted for 5.2% of the whole budget in 1998 (Mari and Strubell 2002: 12). We should consider that these multilingual costs are not wasteful economically, but rather rep-resent cultural richness.

The report also points out that after the EU expansion, the possible combinations of languages to be translated will go up from 110 to 420. That is, it was predicted that when the number of official languages dou-bled from 11 to 21, the number of combinations would increase fourfold, and translation costs would increase enormously (at present there are 20 official languages). Furthermore, an increase of 8 million euros for the payment of interpreters is needed for every additional language every year. The multilingual related expenses of the EU are said to be 2 euros per EU citizen per year, and after the expansion this will go up to 3 euros. The re-port says that EU multilingualism must be limited, and the number of offi-


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cial languages should be restricted at the time of enlargement. The danger that French would fall to the third rank after enlargement was also pointed out. This is because all the new member nations except Malta have a tradi-tion of teaching German as the second language and German influence was expected to expand.

However, after the EU enlargement, German did not become the second language, while English is expanding rapidly. Moreover, the principle of multilingualism was kept for the official languages. Maltese, with the smallest scale (with a population of only 0.4 million), was recognized as an EU official language. It was argued that Maltese should be considered un-der the same conditions as Irish, and should be a “treaty language”. But the intention of the Maltese government was respected and it was recognized as an EU official language (Libarona 2004: 21). The Maltese government passed the “Maltese Language Act” on 20 July 2004 and started full-scale language training, aiming at further promotion of the national language. Under this law, interpreters and translators needed in the EU organizations were to be trained, and a “National Council of Maltese” was founded. The law also aims at the improvement of Maltese in terms of social status. In the case of Maltese, its recognition as an EU official language stimulates the language promotional policy in Malta.

The recognition of Maltese as an official language encourages other small and weak languages, first of all, Irish. It maintains its status as a “treaty language” in the new EU constitution, the Irish version of which is accepted as legally valid. But it is not an EU official language. Lobbying activities aimed at EU recognition of Irish, emerged in Ireland at the time of the Maltese negotiations with the EU. The “Official Language Act” (which grants equal legal status to Irish and English in official documents) was promulgated in July 2003, and efforts were started to promote equal use of Irish, which had been a largely symbolic official language until then. When the legal enforcement plan was announced, a popular movement called Stádas (status) was formed, and it started to campaign for the official recognition of Irish in the EU in December of the same year. No less than 5.000 people assembled in Dublin on 24 April 2004 to demand official recognition. The Irish government formally proposed it at the EU ambassa-dors’ meeting in Brussels on 24 November. What was demanded was “a status equivalent to Maltese”: communicational use within its own country (the second and third clauses of the Regulation of the Council of Ministers, 15 April 1958), official translation of documents of the EU Commission and the European Parliament (fourth clause), the legal Irish version of the

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EU official report (fifth clause), and interpretation at the level of the Coun-cil of Ministers. However, interpretation at the sub-committee level in the EU Commission or in the European Parliament was not requested. Yet, even on this limited scale, an additional 110 translators and 40 interpreters have to be recruited. This demand was recognized at the EU Council of Ministers on 13 June 2005, and Irish will be admitted as twenty-first offi-cial language of EU as of January 2007.

3. The 25-member EU and minority languages

Catalan, when including the adjacent regions of Valencia and the Balearic Islands, has 10 million speakers. In western Europe, it has more speakers than Danish and Finnish, and is thus the seventh largest language after German, French, English, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Demand for official recognition was already strong before the formation of the EU. One of the results of the campaign was the recognition by the European Parliament of Catalan as a communicational language with EU organizations in Decem-ber 1990. At the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, it was used as an offi-cial language.

As in the case of Irish, demand for official recognition started with the demand in 2004 for the new EU constitution to be translated into Catalan. The EU constitution allows for translation of all languages publicly used in some regions of a member state (Part IV; article 448; clause 2). In view of the importance of the cultural diversity of EU, the constitution also stipu-lates (clause 29) the possibility of recognizing the translated version as official if the draft is translated within six months after the signature of the last draft of the constitution. The autonomous republics in Spain reacted to this quickly. On 4 November 2004 “four versions” of three languages (Basque, Galician, Catalan, plus the Valencian variety) were submitted by the Spanish government to the EU Commission and Council of Ministers. Recognition as official translated versions was promptly announced. In this manner, the regional languages of Spain were granted official recognition by the EU (Pujadas 2004: 9).

On 13 December 2004, the Spanish government further filed an official request for “the recognition in the EU of all languages that have official status in Spain”, calling for the use of Basque, Galician and Catalan in communication with EU organizations (the second and third clauses of Regulation of the Council of Ministers, 15 April 1958), and in EU official


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reports (clause 5). It was added that the Spanish government would pay the additional expenses for translation. The Spanish government also asked for the addition of the three languages to the Socrates programme, the general educational programme of the EU, and to Lingua, the language acquisition and promotional programme (Pujadas 2004: 10). The inclusion in the Lin-gua programme will require the acquisition of a status almost equivalent to an EU official language. Irish and Letzebuergisch are included in these programmes. Norwegian and Icelandic of the European Economic Area (EEA) are also eligible for these programmes. What is important is the volition of member states. As in the case of Ireland, this demand will probably be granted.

Such activity has affected other leading minority languages. For exam-ple on 23 July 2004, Member of the European Parliament Jill Evans of Plaid Cymru (Welsh Party) announced a campaign for official recognition of Welsh in the EU, following the examples of Ireland and Catalonia. She also said “even Maltese with fewer speakers than Welsh is now an EU offi-cial language”. The official recognition of Maltese is thus very encouraging for the promotional movements of minority languages.

According to the new constitution, the EU is committed to its “rich cul-tural and linguistic diversity” (Part I, article 3, clause 3); this may well be stated as the major premise of the identity of the EU. Thus minority lan-guages can be granted official recognition at various levels of the EU. However, the number of official languages and working languages will not be increased without restriction. Based on the present budget, it is impossi-ble to continue in this direction unless substantially more funds are allo-cated to measures for the promotion of cultural diversity. This concerns the very identity of the EU. Budget limitations lead to a re-examination of such a fundamental point. As a realistic choice, the number of official languages could be extended formally, but be restricted in use. In this case, official languages and working languages would not be identified in the same cate-gory, but considered separately. Working languages could be limited to between three and five. Pivot interpretation (or two-stage interpretation in which English or French is used as an intermediate language) is a well-known technique of multilingual interpretation (Lederer 2004: 86–89). Thus, widely used working languages could serve as pivot languages.

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4. Devolution and regional languages and cultures in Britain

4.1. Great Britain and minority languages

In Great Britain under Labour, the regional devolution policy established in 1997 has been enhanced, and the promotion of regional languages and cul-tures has benefited from it (Hara 2003; Williams 2004). This paper deals with Wales and Scotland under the autonomous Parliament, regarding mat-ters that have not been reported previously.

In March 2000, Britain signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and ratified it in March of the following year. The first report was published in July 2002. According to it, six languages, Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic, Irish, Cornish and Scots (in Scotland and Ulster) are rec-ognized by Britain as minority languages. These are in fact regional lan-guages of Britain. Cornish, spoken in Cornwall until the end of the 18th century, started a revival movement after the end of the 19th century. Doz-ens of families are using it as a home language now. Scots is a Germanic language of southern Scotland (Lowland), and it may be considered as an English dialect. Scots in Ulster is a language of people who emigrated to Ulster (Northern Ireland) from Scotland.

I interviewed Professor Robert Dunbar in September 2004. Prof. Dunbar is a legal scholar and critical commentator of the report on British linguistic policy (Dunbar 2003) after the British ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. He suggests an interesting approach to the solution of the Northern Ireland problem, namely the promotion of mi-nority languages. As a matter of fact, the Belfast Agreement of 1998, the so-called “Good Friday Agreement”, mentions the promotion of Irish and Scots. That is, “the British and the Irish governments take action in order to promote Irish and Scots” for the purpose of “respecting linguistic diversity”. Talks started in December 1999 between language organizations of both countries, leading to the foundation of “Tha Boord O Ulster-Scotch”, the Ulster Scots Language Council and “Foras na Gaeilge”, Council of Irish Gaelic. In November 2000, the two councils agreed on a three-year plan for language policy with a budget which amounted to a total of £ 4.1 million. The Ulster Scots Research Institute of Ulster University in Northern Ireland received a grant to produce a Scots-English dictionary, collecting data, etc. Promoting both Scots and Irish in the whole of Ireland including the North can be expected to further peaceful cooperation between the two countries. The amount of the original budget for Ireland is € 17.5 million.


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Of course, the background of the confrontation in Northern Ireland is re-ligious in nature. Irish is the national language of the Republic of Ireland, and is connected with Roman Catholicism. Scots on the other hand is the community language of migrants from Scotland, and is associated with the Protestant side. The governments of Britain and Ireland agreed to support promotional activities for both languages, linked to peaceful cultural activi-ties.

4.2. Wales

In September 2003, I investigated the activity of “Menter Iaith” (linguistic measure), a voluntary organization for the promotion of language use at the community level in Wales. The Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Language Board support the private sector and its various initiatives. I visited the municipalities of Cwm Gwendraeth in Sir Gaerfyrddin (Carmarthenshire), southwest Wales, a coal-mining region consisting of ten towns and villages, with a population of some 50.000 people. Although 80% of residents used Welsh on a daily basis until the 1980s, an investigation in 2001 showed a decrease to a level of between 70% and 50%. A level of 70% has been shown to be crucial for maintenance as a community language. A branch of Menter Iaith was, therefore, formed and activities started in 1991. The first Menter branches were formed in the rural area. Two or three volunteers are stationed in each community and charged with organizing various events, such as festivals, concerts, parties, etc. Annual subsidies for these activities do not exceed £ 40.000, but a large part of the expenses are covered by the profits generated by these events (John 2001).

Since the foundation of the Welsh Assembly in 1999, the budget of the Welsh Language Board rose from £ 6.8 million in 2002 to £ 12.3 million in 2005. Various kinds of “language schemes” were prepared. These were obligatory development plans for every public body and they were also recommended for use by the private sector. The Welsh language policy was thus relatively well funded during these years, but the programme will be terminated in 2007. This means that the management of language policy by a centralized organization will no longer be necessary. Instead it will be possible for individual government agencies to promote Welsh in accor-dance with the policy of “Iaith Pawb” (language of everybody) announced in August 2002. An increase of Welsh speakers by 5% is targeted for the ten-year period from 2001 to 2011. During the decade up to 2001, Welsh

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speakers increased by 2 – 4% (Hara 2004), so this is not an impossible tar-get; but in order to achieve this aim a 25% increase is necessary at the edu-cational level of elementary and junior high schools. At present, education is carried out through the medium of Welsh in about 420 elementary schools. An additional 100 schools will have to adopt this practice in order to reach the target in 2011. For this, 800 additional teachers must be re-cruited. It is possible that this target can be attained, since linguistic and cultural policies have been carried out in a favourable manner since the Welsh Language Act in 1993, and by the inauguration of the Welsh Assem-bly in 1999.

4.3. Scotland

Compared with Wales, Scotland has a long tradition of autonomy, and self-confidence regarding its own culture is strong. However, it is hard to say whether and how cultural identity is linked with its languages: Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig), a Celtic language related to Irish, and Scots, a Germanic language related to English. In this regard, we can see a similarity with Brittany in France where two languages coexist: Breton, a Celtic language, and Gallo, a French dialect. After the inauguration of the Scottish Parlia-ment in 1999, Scotland did not engage in the promotion of its languages and cultures, in contradistinction with Wales. Some interesting measures are now being carried out however. First of all, the Bord na Gaidhlig (Gaelic Development Agency) was founded in March 2003 as the Gaelic language development office. Under the direct control of the Scottish Par-liament, this organization is expected to play a role similar to the Welsh Language Board. At the time of founding, it had eight members; in 2003 its budget amounted to £ 830.000, a tenth of the language promotion budget of Wales, but equal to the scale of the Ofis ar Brezhoneg (Breton Language Board) of Brittany. The Welsh Language Board began its activities after the Welsh Language Act of 1993. Scotland thus lagged behind Wales by ten years. In terms of its speakers, Scottish Gaelic decreased by 11% in the ten-year period from 1991 to 2001, and the total number of speakers declined to 58.650, only a little more than 1% of the Scottish population of 5.100.000. In the face of this situation, a language revival policy was initi-ated.

The Scottish Parliament appointed a “Gaelic language officer”, and the rehabilitation of Gaelic in Parliament started in November 2002. A transla-


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tion service had not been available until that time, but this officer is now in charge of it. Another officer was appointed in June 2003, charged with maintaining the Parliamentary homepage in Gaelic. Prior to the Gaelic Language Act, language revitalization initiatives were limited to local areas (Isle of Lewis, Isle of Sky, etc.), i.e., the islands that are the so-called Gaelic-speaking areas. The draft of the new Gaelic Language Act, which considered application in all areas, was drawn up by the Gaelic language development office in November 2003, and was passed in the Scottish Par-liament in November 2004. In this we can see similarities with the language policy of the Ofis ar Brezhoneg in Brittany. Breton is traditionally spoken only of the western part of Brittany, but it symbolizes the cultural identity of Brittany, and the language revitalization policy of Brittany covers all regions. It is also symbolic that the first elementary school using the me-dium of Gaelic in Scotland was founded in Glasgow in 1999, not tradition-ally a Gaelic-speaking region. A similar situation obtains in Brittany. Ele-mentary education in Breton was introduced in Rennes and Nantes, in the eastern part of Brittany, which is not traditionally a Breton-speaking area. Furthermore, at the educational level, Scots is very weak, and this is com-parable to the situation of Gallo in Brittany. Educational circles do not fa-vour the promotion of Gallo. More importance seems to be attached to lan-guages that are more remote from the national language, both in Britain and in France, that is, Celtic languages rather than English or French dialects. This attitude appears to be related to identity: the clearer the distinction between a minority language and the majority language, the stronger its speakers’ sense of linguistic identity.

The Gaelic language law was based on the model of the Welsh Lan-guage Act of 1993. There are also similarities with the Official Language Act of Ireland in 2003. A common feature of the three laws is that a lan-guage plan is designed and an agency established (language boards, lan-guage offices, etc.) to guide and promote its execution. Notice that there are also certain differences. In the case of the Welsh Language Act, the Board has a supervising function regarding the implementation of language poli-cies. In the case of the Official Language Act of Ireland, the powers held by the Language Board are of a wider scope, covering public institutions, the private sector (e.g. the advertising industry) and legal recommendations. However, in the case of the Gaelic Language Act, equality of Gaelic with English is not stated (it is merely guaranteed as an official language of Scotland), and it is not planned to be used in the legal system, either. Also the Act does not contain a list of recommendations for public institutions to

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draw up language promotion plans (such as exists in the case of Welsh and Irish); it just gives a general definition. Language promotional activists have criticized the insufficiency of the Act (Kidner 2004).

The new building of the Scottish Parliament was completed in October 2004. I had the opportunity of visiting it at the beginning of September of the same year, under the guidance of the Gaelic language officer. Bilingual signs in Gaelic and English are displayed everywhere. Scots is not used for directional signage. This means that the distinction between Gaelic and Scots is already becoming clearer regarding political status.

5. Conclusion

On 2 February 2005, President Ivaratze of the Basque autonomous gov-ernment made the following statement in the Spanish Parliament, first in Basque and then in Spanish: “I came to the Spanish Parliament, in order to protect the right of the Basque people to determine their own future.” The Spanish Parliament voted against independence of the Basque Country. In response, the Basque president called for a referendum in order to pursue a “free state” within the Spanish kingdom, rather than complete political independence.

Both in the Basque Country and in Northern Ireland, the way to inde-pendence is fraught with obstacles, but in the end the only solution is self-government. In Scotland, the Nationalist Party, which aims at independence, is very active (Murkens et al. 2002). Considering historical circumstances, I used to believe that an independent Scotland was a real possibility. How-ever, after visiting Scotland several times, I am convinced that political independence no longer holds any promise there or in other peripheral re-gions in Europe. The concept of “multi-layered governance” (Rawlings 2003) provides a reference point for this. In the economic world, the col-lapse of single nation-state markets is already an evident fact. This is now happening in the political world, too. Not only the boundaries of nation-states, as in the case of EU, but also the boundaries of national institutions and international organizations, such as NGOs, are becoming ambiguous. Inside the state, the hierarchy has become more and more flexible and vague, and this is echoed in international organizations. The power of net-works, such as NPOs or voluntary movements, and of intergovernmental management is increasing; in connection with this, power is shifting from a super-state at the top to non-governmental organizations and regional gov-


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ernments. Thus, a kind of “dissolution of nation-states” can be observed in many parts of the world.

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Index

abilities, English 43 Ainu 38, 47, 127–129 Aizawa, Keiichi 67, 68 Alliance Française 54, 66 Ammon, Ulrich 54, 62, 65, 68, 81,

99, 102, 111, 112, 127, 158 Arabic 24, 45, 57, 58, 73, 124 artificial language 29 Association of Japanese Teachers in

Europe 74, 79, 83 Association phonétique internation-

ale 175, 183, 185 Australian national language policy

35automatic translation 109

Baba, Tatsui 121, 132 Basque 196, 202 Bauman, Richard 126, 132 Beckett, Francis 84, 88 Befu, Harumi 35, 47 Bello, Josefina 77, 88 Bengali 24, 59 Bickerton, David 74, 88 bilingual society 118 bilingualism 9, 10, 110, 122 Blair, Tony 5, 6 Blommaert, Jan 33, 47, 125–127,

132 Boli, John 38, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre 127, 128, 132 Breton 200, 201 Briggs, Charles S. 126, 132 British Council 55, 66

Brodie, Janine 35, 47 Bunkach 12, 14, 16 Bunka Shingikai 36, 42, 47 Burgess, Chris 39, 47

Canagarajah, Suresh 36, 48, 44 Carroll, Tessa 115, 132 Catalan 196 Chinese 24, 39, 45, 46, 57, 58, 84,

96, 99, 100–103, 107, 124, 129, 141, 142, 160, 176

classical 159 written 142

Chinese character 101, 107, 111 Chinese studies 142 choice 73, 149, 150, 156, 157, 170 choice, theory of 159 choice of language 27, 56, 61 choice of linguistic structure 186 choice, unexpected 157, 160 Christ, Herbert 54, 69 Chung, Erin Aeran 38, 48 citizenship 35, 37, 191 Cobarrubias, Juan 129, 132 colonialism 25 colonial languages 24, 57 colonization 22–24, 44, 121, 131,

162 communication

borderless vii global 8 international 7

communication, rationalisation of 26

208 Index

208

communicative function 7, 12, 15 communitarian function of language

30community language 199 community schools 45 constraints 156, 158, 169

institutional 158 Convery, Anne 79, 88 Cooper, Robert L. 54, 69 Cornish 198 corpus planning 95 corpus politics 62 cosmopolitan 192 Coulmas, Florian 30, 31, 56, 59, 68,

69, 98, 111, 112, 115, 132, 143, 153, 156, 158, 170

Crystal, David 115, 132 cultural diversity 4, 196, 197

de Graaf, Tjeerd 128, 133 Deguchi, Masayuki 170 Dhir, Krishna S. 158, 170 dialects 12, 13, 15, 128, 129, 198,

200, 201 Japanese 42, 107, 112

Diaz, Jess 115, 133 Dickel Dunn, Cynthia 127, 133 diglossia, medical 143 Dixon, R.M.W. 158, 159, 171 Dore, Ronald 142, 153 Dudden, Alexis 160, 171 Dunbar, Robert 198, 203 Dutch 59, 102, 141, 142, 151, 152,

154, 159, 160, 184, 185

Early Language Learning Initiative 84

Eastman, Carol M. 33, 48 economic criterion 184

economic globalization 37 economic power of 57, 58, 98–100 economic ranking of languages 99 economic value 95, 98, 113 economic value, English 109 economic value, German 109 economy 26, 27, 30, 87, 95, 102,

110, 158 global 11, 15, 25

economy of culture 102 economy of languages 99 Ehlich, Konrad 24, 31, 112, 170,

171 English vii, 9, 10, 20, 23, 24, 34, 36,

38, 39, 43–46, 57–67, 97, 98, 100–102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 115, 141, 146, 157, 165 abilities 43, as an international language 74 choice of 100 hegemony of 177 imperialism 106, 120

English only 64, 150 proficiency 118–121, 145, 150, 161

English-speaking countries 59–61 English spelling 177, 181–183, 188 English, spread of 64, 65 English as (second) official language

of Japan 112, 115–117 Esperanto 61 Estonian 192 ethnic communities 45 ethnic identity 2, 35 etnicity 1, 2, 7, 156 EU (official) languages 77, 81, 192,

193 European languages 74, 77, 82–85 Europeanisation 22

Index 209

209

Evans, Mary 82, 89

Finnish 192, 196 foreign language(s) 44, 45, 59–64,

67, 74, 77, 84, 95, 99 curricula 56, 67 education 95, 125 teaching 71 second 67

foreign words 174 Fotos, Sandra 133 French 24, 45, 57, 59, 71, 73, 74, 77,

80, 81, 84, 96, 101, 103, 106, 141, 142, 148, 150, 151, 159, 165, 187

Fukase, Makio 115, 133 Fujimura, Tsukuru 131 Funabashi, Y ichi 118–120, 133 function, communitarian 24, 30 function, communicative 7, 15 function, identity 7 function of language 8, 10, 57

teleological 28 Furuse, Yukihiro 40, 49

Gaelic 198, 201 Galician 196 Gallo 200, 201 Gellner, Ernest 7, 8 geographic terms 179 George, Susan 191, 203 German 24, 45, 57–61, 63, 71, 73,

74, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 95, 96, 99–103, 105–107, 109–111, 141–144, 148, 150, 157, 159, 165, 185 as compulsory language 143 as a foreign language 64, 103, 106 as language of medicine 141

as second language 195 attitudes towards 80

German-language publication 146, 148, 151

German skills 68 German-speaking countries 53, 141,

150, 151 German spelling 174, 177, 181 German Studies 53, 62, 85 German, study of 77 German transcription 184, 189 global communication 8, 63 global economy 1, 11, 25, 26 global framework of languages 58 global interaction 34 global language 10, 59 global lingua franca 177 global literacy 118, 119, 125 global markets 3, 6 global standardization 174 global system 159 globalization 1–5, 7, 8, 14, 16, 26,

33, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 46, 119, 126, 131, 191, 192 economic 37 of consciousness 191, 192

glocalization 2, 3, 5, 8–11, 14, 192 linguistic 10, 11 of language 8

Goebel Noguchi, Mary 127, 133 Goethe Institute 53–55, 60, 66 Gonzalez, Mike 77, 91 good governance 2–5, 7 Gottlieb, Nanette 33, 40, 48, 111 Graddol, David 58, 69 Greek 23, 28, 178, 192 Gumperz, John 126, 133 Gunaratne, Shelton A. 159, 171

210 Index

210

Hahn, Hans 74, 89 Hamel, Rainer E. 65, 69 handwriting 40, 42 Hara, Kiyoshi 111, 112, 198, 200,

203 Head, Jonathan 37, 48 Hebrew 20 Hegel, G. W. F. 188, 189 Heinrich, Patrick 112, 115, 128,

132–134 Herbillon, Michel 194, 203 Himeno, Yukari 39, 48 Hindi 24, 58, 59 Hirataka, Fumiya 54, 69 Holenstein, Elmar 111, 189 Hollingworth, William 79, 80, 82,

85, 90 Holmes, Diana 72–75, 83, 84, 90 Horvat, Andrew 112 Hughes, Jane 76, 90 Huguier, M. 150, 151, 153 human capital 35, 55 humankind 19, 20, 27 Hungarian 73, 192

identity 9, 14, 22, 30, 39, 56, 122, 126, 201 language of 9 local 14 national 14, 15

identity function 7, 10, 15 Imanishi, Noriko 117, 124, 137 immigrants 37, 39 individualism 7, 8 Indonesian 24, 58, 184 information technology 29, 41 Inoue, Fumio 98, 99, 103, 105, 112,

113, 129, 130, 134 Inoue, Hisashi 121, 123, 134

Inoue, Miyako 127, 134 Instituto Cervantes 55 international communication 7, 9,

36, 63, 66, 96, 110, 121 international language 44, 59, 124,

130, 131 international law 160 international maps 177 international order 160 international organizations 57, 62,

202 international society 36 internationalization 96, 116, 124,

129, 130, 149, 163, 188 Internet 2, 34, 39f., 42, 101, 109,

116, 119, 176 Irish 195–199 Italian 24, 45, 74, 77, 84, 100–102,

141, 185 Ito, Joi 82, 90 It , Hirobumi 160, 161

Jackson, Melissa 79, 90 Jakobson, Roman 181 Japan Foundation 55, 66, 79, 81, 83,

90Japan Industrial Standards (JIS)

characters 41 Japanese 24, 39, 57–59, 63. 71, 73,

74, 81–83, 86, 95, 96, 99–102, 107, 110, 146, 159 as a foreign language 35, 75 as language of medical research 147 attitudes towards 80 study of 36, 46, 71 teacher training for 79 written 40–42 language education overseas 36

Index 211

211

offered in schools 82 language proficiency 122 language training 151

Japanese skills 68 Japanese studies 78–80 John, Arwel 199, 203 Johnstone, Richard 91 Jones, Peter 204 Joy, Sarah 71, 85, 90

Kabashima, Tadao 40, 49 Keating, Michael 192, 203, 204 Kai, Mustur 121, 122, 134 Kan, Sanjun 126, 129, 134 Kanda, Yasunori 40, 49 Kashiwazaki, Chikako 39, 49 Kat , K ichi 118 Katsuragi, Takao 33, 49, 111, 112,

130, 134 Kawai, Yasuo 118, Kelly, Michael 72–75, 83, 84, 90 Kida, Jun’ichiro 40, 49 Kidner, Camilla 202, 203 Kigoshi, Tsutomu 96, 113 Kitazato, Shibasaburo 103 Kleineidam, Hartmut 54, 69 Kloss, Heinz 54 Ko, Yonjin 115, 134 Koizumi, Junichiro 6, 44 kokugo 11–15, 35 Korean 45, 46, 59, 103, 107, 124,

129 Korean alphabet (Hangeul) 176 Kosegarten, J. G. L. 182 Koyama, Wataru 126, 135 Kulmus, Johann Adam 142 Kunihiro, Masao 118, 135

language acquisition 54 language alliances 65–68 language and thought 29, 123 language, artificial 29 language behaviour, collective 156 language choice 99, 149, 155, 158,

159, 161, 162, 165, 169 language, colonial 24 language community 58, 61, 63–65 language, communitarian function of

30language contact 22 language corpus 54 language death 35 language degree(s) 72, 75, 85 language demand 96 language diversity 35 language education 103 language, global 11 language ideology 124–127, 131 language imperialism 121 language industry 56, 60 language in higher education 71 language learning 84, 86 language, local 10, 11 language market 98, 99, 101 language minorities 127 language mixture 22 language modernization 126 language needs 38 language of identity 9 language planning 33, 38, 124, 125,

144, 156 language policy 10–12, 14–16, 33f.,

40f., 46, 47, 156, 199 language policy guidelines on kanji

use 42 language policy, Japanese 12–14 language policy, nationalistic 14

212 Index

212

language preference 147 language promotion 53–56, 60, 65,

66, 200, 202 language reduction 21 language regime 116, 126, 129, 130,

143, 155, 159 Japanese 169 post-modern 130

language, regional 9, 11, 15 language replacement 22 language revitalization policy 201 language rights 10, 11, 35

global 11 language spread 56 language status 54, 158 language, standard 13 language teaching 74, 82 language, vernacular 29 Latvian 192 Lapidoth, Ruth 192, 203 Latin 23, 28, 141, 142

spelling 181 Lederer, Marianne 197, 204 Lee, Yeounsuk 116, 126, 135 Letzebuergisch 193, 197 lexical borrowing 143 Li Hongzhang 160 Libarona, Iñigo Urrutia 193, 195,

204 Liberatore, Angela 3, 16 lingua franca 8–10, 20, 25, 60, 64,

115, 118, 142, 146, 147, 150, 174, 179, 181, 184, 186 global 60

linguistic ability 19–22 linguistic choice 156, 159 linguistic determinism 126, 127 linguistic diversity 38, 46, 194 linguistic glocalization 10, 11

linguistic imperialism 120, 128 linguistic landscape 107 linguistic market 27 linguistic minorities 9 linguistic relativity 126 linguistic rights 128 linguistic structure, choice of 186 List of Characters for General Use

40, 41 Lithuanian 192 literacy 43 loanwords 122, 184 Lo Bianco, Joseph 37f., 49 local-national languages 146, 148 Long, Daniel 127, 135 Lorette, G. 151, 153 Low, Lesley 91 Lukes, Steven 8, 17

MacLeod, Donald 73, 74, 77, 91 McPake, Joanna 76, 91 Maher, John 34, 49, 127, 135, 141,

145, 150, 153 Mandarin 118 Malay 118 Malaysian 184 Maltese 192, 195, 197 Mari, Isidor 194, 204 market ethos 82 market value of languages 96, 98,

101, 110 marketization 1, 2 Marshall, Keith 85, 87, 91 Mashiko, Hidenori 127, 135 Martell, Luke 5, 6, 17 Mathews, Gordon 38, 49 Matsuzawa, Shigefumi 118, 119 Matussek, Thomas 80, 81, 87, 91 Maurais, Jacques 159, 171

Index 213

213

McCune, George 176 medicine 142f., 152 medical diglossia 143 medical lingua franca 146, 147, 150 medical text 142 migrants 39, 119 Mikawa, Katsutoshi 121, 129, 130,

135 Miller, Roy Andrew 33, 50 minority 37, 86 minority language 7–9, 86, 87, 99,

101, 175, 191, 192, 197, 198 renaissance of 7

Miyazima, Tatuo 95, 113 modernization 1, 62, 159 monolingualism 20, 26, 27, 29, 38,

112 economic 30 prehistoric 20

Mori, Arinori 121 Mori, Ogai 103 Morimoto, Tetsur 121, 123, 125,

127, 136 Morris, Michael A. 159, 171 Moteki, Hiromichi 118, 120, 121,

124, 135 mother tongue 9 multiculturalism 34 multilingual interpretation 197 multilingualism 37f., 110, 112, 130,

194 management of 35 medical 141, 142

Munshi, Surendra 3, 5, 16, 17 Murkens, Jo Eric 202, 204

Nakamatsu, Takeo 132, 135 Nakamura, Kei 116, 122, 123, 125,

127, 136

Nakayama, Yutaka 57, 69 nation 24 national identity 14, 15, 37, 39 National Institute for Japanese Lan-

guage 33, 96, 121 national language 9, 11, 12, 34, 55,

57, 120, 123, 199 National Language (Deliberative)

Council of Japan 12, 36, 40, 50 national language policy 15 nationalism 2, 6, 9, 10, 11, 15, 120,

122, 126 Japanese 12

nation building 35 nation state 34, 36, 191,202, 203 Natsume, S seki 161, 171 nihongo 12–14, 35 Nomura, Masaaki 41, 50

Ó Riagáin, Dónall 194, 204 Obuchi, Keiz 115, 117 official language 57, 115–120, 122,

123, 129, 178, 192–195, 197 second 129, 131

official spelling 177, 182, 183, 187 official status 196 official transcription 186 official translation 195 Omura Jintaro 53, 54, 69

no, Susumu 116, 123–125, 127, 136

Osumi, Midori 127, 136 ta, Toshihisa 123, 136

Otsu, Yukio 170, 171 Oyafuso, Keiko 132, 136

Pennycook, Alistair 158, 171 Phillipson, Robert 54, 70, 106, 113,

158, 171

214 Index

214

Phipps, Alison 77, 91 Pickering, Angela 76, 80, 81, 92, pidgin 25 Pinker, Steven 126, 136 Pinyin 175, 176, 183, 184 plurilingualism 20–23, 25–30 Pörksen, Uwe 157, 171 Polish 73, 181, 192 political correctness 179, 181 Poon, Anita Y.K. 115, 137 Portuguese 24, 45, 58, 59, 73, 84,

102, 129, 185 promotion of foreign languages 65 Pujadas, Bernat 193, 196, 197, 204

Rawlings, Richard 202, 204 Refsing, Kirsten 75, 82, 92 regional languages 9, 11, 15, 198 regional dialects 12, 42 Reischauer, Edwin O. 176 religion 1, 2, 6, 191 Rhaeto-Romanic 175 Reinbothe, Roswitha 53, 70 Ricento, Thomas 35, 51 Robb, Stephen 76, 87, 92 Robertson, Roland 191, 204 Roman alphabet 175, 178 Roman script 175 Roman transcription 176, 185 Romance languages 178 Romanization 176 Rowlett, Paul 83, 92 Rother, Larry 115, 136 Russian 24, 45, 57, 58, 73, 77, 85,

96, 99, 100, 102, 124, 165, 179 Ryukyuan 128

Safran, William 126, 137 Saito, Mokichi 103

Sakaguchi, Alicia 61, 70 Sanchez, M.Y. 151, 153 Sanskrit 177 Sassen, Saskia 191, 204 Sat , Hiroko 124, 137 Sauer, Hans 23, 31 Savage, Theresa 158, 171 Schmidt, Rudi 6, 17 Schröder, Gerhard 5 Scots 198, 202 Scottish 198, 200 Schuerkens, Ulrike 2, 17 scientific communication 152, 157,

162, 170 script, conservative 178 script policy 40f., 43 second language acquisition 9 Shimokawa, Yutaka 56, 70 Shioda, Takehiro 115, 117, 119, 137 Siddle, Richard 35, 51, 127, 137 Silverstein, Michael 126, 137 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 21, 31 Slovakian 192 Slovenian 192 Spanish 24, 39, 45, 57–59, 73, 74,

77, 81, 84, 96, 101, 103, 105, 149, 151, 185, 202

speech community 98, 101, 126, 128

speech recognition 42 spelling 173, 175, 186

German 177 hybrid 182 phonetic 183

Spohn, Willfried 2, 6, 17 Sprague, Jonathan 115, 137 standard language 13, 15, 107, 112 standard of correctness 127 standard transcription 185

Index 215

215

status 55–57, 98, 99, 116, 193, 195, 197 of English 59 of German 96 of Japanese 96

status planning 95 Stockholm syndrome 121 Strubell, Miquel 194, 204 Suzuki, Mishio 117, 124, 137 Suzuki, Tessa 44, 51 Suzuki, Takao 116–118, 121–125,

127, 133, 136, 137 Suzuki, Yoshisato 116, 118, 119,

135, 138 Swaan, Abram de 3, 16, 159, 172 Swedish 102, 192

Tai, Erika 131, 138 Tamil 118 Tanaka, Akio 41, 51 Tanaka, Katsuhiko 116, 120, 124,

125, 131, 138 Tanaka, Shinya 124, 138 teaching Japanese 82, 83 technology 29, 34, 39f., 43, 47, 101,

116, 119 Terazawa, Yoshio 117, 138 Thomas, George M. 38, 47 Thompson, J.B. 125, 138 Tibetan script 178 TOEFL 117, 121 Trabant, Jürgen 170, 172 transcription 177, 180, 181, 184–

187 transcription problems 174 transcription systems 175, 189 transliteration 178 Treitschke, Heinrich von 53

Tsuda, Yukio 116, 120–122, 124, 126, 127, 138

Tsunoda, Minoru 106, 113

universal grammar 28, 155 universal language ability 20 Urdu 58

Vaillancourt, François 158, 171 Valencian 196 vernacular language 29 Verschueren, Jef 126, 132 vitality of German 110 vitality of Japanese 110 voice recognition 42

Walvoort, HC. 151, 152, 153 Watts, Catherine 75, 76, 80, 81, 92 Watanabe, Sh ichi 121, 138 Weinrich, Harald 170, 172 Welsh 197f. Welsh Assembly 199, 200, 204 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 126, 138 Whitney, Dwight William 121, 139 Winkmann, G. 151, 153 Wieviorka, Michel 191, 205 Williams, Collin H. 198, 204 women’s language 127 word processing 40 working language 193, 194, 197 world communication 96 world citizen 119 world economy 86 world language 61, 62 world language of trade 27 world market 25 world society 31 world trade 58 Wright, Sue 7–10, 17

216 Index

216

writing 39f., 42, 76 writing of characters 40 writing system 177 written language 173

Yashiro, Kyoko 135, 153

Yasuda, Toshiaki 116, 126, 129, 139

Yokoyama, Masami 40, 52 Yoshida, Kensaku 45, 52

Language Regimes in Transformation: Future Prospects for German and Japanese in Science, Economy, and Politics (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 93)

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