This paper explores the relationship between Korean speakers' background attributes in Japan and their language use, as well as the mutual relationships between the different attributes. Previous studies have shown that the different attributes that speakers have affect their everyday language use. However, there are no detailed analyses of how the different attributes are related to each other, and whether the effects of speaker attributes upon their language use vary depending on conversation partner or the place of conversation. In this study, the relationship between schoolchildren's attributes and the language they use is analyzed based on a questionnaire survey conducted at Korean School A. The results show that what language a child uses is influenced by the child's birthplace, the parents' birthplace, the time of arrival in Japan, and the time of school entrance. Moreover, these attributes form a hierarchy in which the child's birthplace plays the most important role. The results of a survey conducted at Korean School B show the same tendency. However, the overall results also show that within the domain of school, the type of language that is dominant at the school as a whole has a larger impact on language use than a child's birthplace.

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Revitalization of endangered languages is a global issue. Joshua Fishman's influential theory, 'Reversing Language Shift' (1991), was an attempt to 'diagnose' difficulties, identify parallels and share solutions among languages. From the viewpoint of (a) obtaining an understanding of the situation of the language and (b) looking at mutual concerns, comparison is useful because it may enable endangered languages to help each other. In this study, I compare recent tendencies in Ainu, an indigenous language in Japan, with movements in Celtic languages. Ainu has few native speakers, but excellent records of native speech exist. Endangered languages have traditionally existed as ethnolinguistic symbols, 'heritage' languages, and as tourist and business 'products.' However, recently new waves of Internet networking are enabling the emergence of new platforms for endangered languages in music (folk, rock, jazz, and techno), art, dance, film and radio, language classes, and the emergence of competent teachers and new textbooks. 'Indigenous' is the new cool and there is sustained political action by Ainu organizations. Strong centralization of school education and the weakness of regional autonomy in France and Japan have damaged Breton in France and Ainu in Japan. Japan and France are both countries that are reluctant to welcome the concept of ethnolinguistic diversity and lack policies to support minority and endangered languages. In Britain, political and 'local' devolution to the regions (Scotland, Wales, Cornwall) is galvanizing local governments to establish language revitalization strategies.

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This study is based on a survey of the language life of Brazilians, Latin American "newcomers," living in Soja City, Okayama Prefecture. It discusses the language life of Brazilian residents, various language problems, and the factors contributing to these problems. The survey found the following: Brazilian residents use mainly Portuguese within their own communities and speak Japanese only in specific situations in their daily lives; they rarely interact with local Japanese residents; they are barely able to carry out everyday conversation in Japanese, although they can read and write hiragana and katakana, but little or no kanji; and their social living environment prevents them from learning Japanese on a long-term basis, despite their keen willingness and strong need to learn the language. This study suggests that to solve the language problems faced by Brazilian residents, it is important for Brazilian residents not only to improve their Japanese skills, but also to promote mutual understanding and interaction between them and local Japanese residents. That is, Japanese language classes in local communities should be not only places for learning Japanese, but also places for interaction among Japanese and foreign community residents.

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This study investigates linguistic aspects of language transfer, focusing on the effects of transfer from second language (L2) (Japanese) to first language (L1) (Korean), although language transfer is generally considered from L1 to L2. In this study the degree of tolerance of the Korean form, "a/eo batda," which corresponds to "-te morau" in Japanese. was examined in two groups, Group 1 (KJ) and Group 2 (KK). The results of the study indicate that tolerance for the KJ group was significantly higher than for the KK group, though "a/eo batda" is an unnatural phrase in Korean. This suggests that L2, that is Japanese, affects L1, Korean, in some ways.'Paradigm rationalization' is proposed as a reason for this reverse transfer phenomenon. There is also a possibility that tolerance may be affected by whether the verb followed by "a/eo batda" is a compound verb or not.

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The heritage language of a minority community often plays a great part in holding the community together and reinforcing ethnic identity. Its use in formal community settings and intergenerational conversations is often regarded as polite (Ogoshi 1982, 1983, 2005; Li 1994). Code-switching itself has been said to have discourse functions when used as a contextualization cue in conversation (Gumperz 1982). This paper examines the language use of bilingual Pakistani pupils in a Tokyo suburb using linguistic ethnography. Although the pupils are able to speak standard Japanese and do so most of the time, they occasionally use different languages or varieties, such as Urdu, English, and the second-language variety of Japanese that the community adults use. Rather than simply adjusting to the linguistic skills of the adults in Japanese, the bilinguals' codeswitches across languages and varieties were found to be resources in intergenerational communication including discourse strategies, and found to add covert and polysemous meaning to construct and reaffirm generational difference within interactions.

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The present paper investigates literacy retention in six bilingual children (three sibling pairs) who lived with their family in a foreign country and have returned to Japan. While these children have developed second language skills, it is known that such proficiencies have been shown to deteriorate rapidly after returning to Japan. A number of factors affect the maintenance of a returnee child's second language, including individual factors such as age on arrival in the host country and length of residence, and these have often been discussed in previous studies. However, the issue of social factors has been left unexamined. This study provides insight that for young returnee children, literacy activities (especially for pleasure) in the home domain, maintenance of peer networks where their second language is used, and parental attitude to support their children's language retention can be a valuable resource to develop the second language in terms of constructing good stories.

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As information technology progresses, equal access to information for disabled people is becoming an important issue. Because of the lack of information that they can access by themselves, people with intellectual disabilities are left at the bottom of the digital divide. The purpose of this paper is to grasp the current situation and to look at issues involved in equal access to information for people with intellectual disabilities based on a study of the process of the publication of a newspaper called "Stage." "Stage" is a newspaper written for everyone to understand, and published specifically for and by people with intellectual disabilities. Interviews with the editor of "Stage" were conducted to reveal the details behind the newspaper's production and its social significance. We also recorded sessions of the editorial meetings of "Stage" in order to grasp the specific difficulties in sentence understanding experienced by people with intellectual disabilities. This study demonstrates the significance of research taking into account the perspectives of people with intellectual disabilities, and the need to accumulate more research in this area. Furthermore, we point out the need to promote the sharing of information and experience gained from experiments such as "Stage" across the conventional divides and to look for ways to work with different sectors.

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When a compliment is issued in conversation, its recipient often responds in such a way as to avoid self-praise. In this study, I examine one such method of self-praise avoidance-producing responses that strategically turn the focus of the recipient himself/herself from the target of the compliment. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, I describe how response is shaped by the type of compliment utterance to which the recipient responds. Previous studies on compliments have not distinguished between the different types of positive evaluations that speakers give when paying compliments. This study suggests that there are two types of positive evaluations: positive evaluations about the recipient himself/herself and positive evaluations about issues that are somehow related to the recipient. In this study, I show that the distinction between these two types is related to the method the recipient employs to turn the focus of himself/herself from the target of the compliment when he/she responds. In other words, we see that compliment responses such as "disagreement" and "partial agreement" are intimately connected to compliment utterances.

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We administered a survey on impression evaluation to Japanese speakers. We included three different functions of the Japanese nominalization marker noda-namely, softening, stressing, and explaining-and asked participants to rate their impressions of each of these. Despite the functional differences, we found a common tendency in their evaluations. Noda was found to convey closeness, intimacy, enthusiasm, and emotion; whereas non-nominalized sentences were found to denote accuracy, courtesy, distance, and self-possession. In addition, the above impressions were found to be significantly strong in the case of Japanese non-nominalization. We argue that the prominence of nominalization in Japanese discourse can be attributed to the strong subjective features of non-nominalization. However, our data indicate that Japanese speakers strongly prefer non-nominalization to the use of noda when noda is used to stress given facts to the hearer. Thus, we conclude that non-nominalization can express respect for the hearer's personal territory as well as detachment and distance from it.

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