The Formation of Brazilian Immigrant Koine in Japan: Dialect Contact, the Founder Principle and Feature Pool

Abstract

This paper reports on the preliminary results from our ongoing variationist research on dialect and language contact and its subsequent koine formation in a Nikkei (Japanese) Brazilian community in Japan. Recordings of spontaneous speech, together with the reading aloud of a wordlist, as well as ethnography were collected from 60 speakers (first and second generation speakers) in Joso City, Ibaraki Prefecture for qualitative and quantitative analyses. This paper focuses only on Strong-R realized through the Brazilian Portuguese wordlist, adopting “koineization processes”, “Founder Principle”, “feature pool” and “colonial lag” as the theoretical frameworks. Our results provide some evidence of dialect leveling and focusing in Brazilian Portuguese as well as xenolectal inputs from Japanese, suggesting that the newly emerging variety in Joso resembles the Southeast and South Dialects in Brazil, where the majority of first generation speakers come from. These findings support the validity and applicability of the koineization processes, the Founder Principle and the concept of feature pool. Furthermore, by pinpointing the demographic evidence that Japanese emigrants to Brazil have been concentrated in these dialect-speaking regions in Brazil, this paper indicates the possibility that similar dialectal makeup may result in similar koine in other Japanese Brazilian communities across Japan.