The Ministry of Education in Japan expressed a concern about local English teachers’ accent in the 1951 edition of the Suggested Course of Study in English, while presenting Received Pronunciation and General American as the model pronunciation for teachers and learners. Since then, Japanese-accented English (JAE) has been constantly criticised by both TESOL practitioners and ‘folk linguists’ in Japan as a gross and shameful deviation from standard speech, with native-speakerism being prevailed in and outside classrooms across the country. However, few empirical findings have reported on L1 English speakers’ perceptions of and ideologies towards JAE. By reviewing and re-analysing the data collected in New Zealand (NZ) at the beginning of the current century, this article sheds light on the identification and indexicality of phonological features of JAE among the Inner Circle speakers of English.
Despite their high motivation for pronunciation improvement, no late learners of English, regardless of their L1 backgrounds, were perceived as a native English speaker by the participants in the test environment. At the same time, JAE was identified at a higher rate than any other variety of L2-accented English, evidently due to the NZ listeners’ massive exposure to Japanese visitors. In the identification process, the conflation of /l/ and /r/ functioned not only as a marker but as a part of stereotype of JAE in a Labovian sense; once listeners had perceived it, they were more likely to assume the speaker to be from a Japanese-speaking background, although the same conflation was commonly observable in other East Asian accents as well. Arguably, this indexicality may have been specific to NZ people at that time.
