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Tongues‐Tied: The Making of a “National Language” and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.115.3.714

1937-5239

Hiraku Shimoda,

Multilingual Education and Policy

PLACE Tokyo.Nango Seinosuke, an official at the newly formed Ministry of Education, has been ordered by the education minister, Tanaka Fujimaro, to create a new common spoken language-a "nationally unified speech"-to be used throughout Japan.He returns to his home in Ko jimachi, hoping to find inspiration in his own household.What he gets instead is linguistic anarchy.Seinosuke himself was born and raised in Cho shu domain, and naturally speaks the Cho shu dialect.But he has married into a Satsuma family, and his wife and father-in-law speak the Satsuma dialect.Their five-year-old son is prone to an odd mix of both, and is precocious enough to use Cho shu speech to cajole his father and Satsuma speech to please his grandfather.The Nango s' maids are Edo locals, but the head maid speaks with a gentle uptown grace, while the younger maids chatter away in the rough-and-tumble downtown colloquial.The driver's To no accent is certainly confounding, although not nearly as much as the male servant's Tsugaru tongue, which is practically incomprehensible to the rest of the household.The one person who can best deal with the chaos is a live-in university student from Nagoya who must often serve as the family interpreter.As it turns out, Seinosuke's challenge lies in his home as much as his office.One day, a thief breaks into the Nango residence.Having been caught in the act, he is surrounded by the entire household.Undaunted, the thief proudly announces himself, waves his sword, and repeatedly demands "jeneko."But the household mills around, confused as to what the intruder is saying; it takes everyone a while to guess that "jeneko" must be some dialect for "valuables."The thief, who turns out to be a fallen samurai from Aizu domain named Wakabayashi Torasaburo , can only slink away empty-handed, thwarted less by the Nango s' vigilance than by his own provincial tongue.This linguistic melting pot was cooked up by the dramatist Inoue Hisashi in his 1985 play Kokugo gannen (Year One of Our National Language).