The aim of this investigation is to explore the suitability of speech posted on Twitter to examine regional language. Accordingly, existing differences among data extracted from Twitter was examined and compared to data extracted from a dialect survey administered to old-aged people and university students in Japan. The result of the comparative analyses revealed that (a) the dialectal speech used by old-aged people hardly reflected the speech posted on Twitter, and (b) the data accumulated from the survey administered to college students mostly matched Twitter speech. Hence, we can utilize Twitter conversations as data in undertaking dialect studies. In particular, these Twitter conversations can be utilized as a data resource in the study of regional variations in word forms. Though Twitter speech cannot be utilized in elucidating regional variations pervading traditional dialects, Twitter speech may serve as a means of finding distributions of new dialects and forms of expressions used mainly by youth groups as well as regional variations pervading expressions that are hardly noticed as dialects, for instance, unnoticeable dialects.

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This paper aims to establish a stylistic typology of Heian–Kamakura period literature through a cluster analysis of stylistic indicators such as the percentage of nouns in a text, average sentence length, percentage of dialog, lexical stratification rate (percentage of native, Sino-Japanese and hybrid lexicon) and usage ratios of the complementizers to and nado when quoting dialog. Through this analysis, it was revealed that Heian–Kamakura period literature can be divided into the following five stylistic categories: wakankonkōbun (‘Japanese-Chinese hybrid’) style, archetypical wabun (‘native’) style, early wabun style, nikki bungaku (‘diary literature’) style A and nikki bungaku style B. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that such a typology is effective in illustrating the stylistic characteristics of various genres of literature as well as the differences between wabun and kanbun kundoku-bun (vernacular readings of Classical Chinese) style texts.

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This study set out to examine research trends around honorifics, names, request, apology, refusal, and complaint, which had received much research attention, in comparative studies on linguistic behavior between Korea and Japan and discuss future tasks. In comparative studies between Japan and Korea, sociolinguistic investigations were conducted from various perspectives with especially many researches focused on language strategies in linguistic behavior. Future study will have to figure out entire linguistic behavior in a synthetic fashion and include both politeness and impoliteness in the scope of analysis from the perspective of fundamental motivations for linguistic behavior.

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