Trends of Studies on Japanese within and outside Japan

1995 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 05301053
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Co-operative Research (A)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: 国語学
• Research Institution: Kyoto Tachibana Women's University (1995); Osaka University (1993-1994)
• Principal Investigator: MIYAJIMA Tatsuo Professor, Kyoto Tachibana Women's University, 文学部, 教授 (30099915)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): ITO Masamitsu Head, The National Language Research Institute, 主任研究官 (20142763) ; EGAWA Kiyoshi Director, The National Language Research Institute, 部長 (30000425) ; NISHIHARA Suzuko Director, The National Language Research Institute, 部長 (60189298) ; TOKUGAWA Munemasa Professor, Gakushuin University, 文学部, 教授 (70000403) ; WATANABE Minoru Professor, Sophia University, 文学部, 教授 (20026678)
• Project Period (FY): 1993 – 1995
• Keywords: Japanese language study / Overseas Japanese language study data / Bibliographical data / Database / The National Language Research Institute

Research Abstract

With the collaboration of linguists in many countries, we could nearly complete the linguistic bibliography on Japanese. We will give in the following a brief comment on the articles in Russia.
Japanese has been actively studied in Russia for a long time. Though Russian is not so popular among Japanese and the results of the study there is known only to a limited circle in Japan. it has been traditionally an advanced country, alongside of Germany, in this field. As for the amount of contemporary studies it ranks next to America and China. Our bibliography was mainly compiled by Prof. Vardul of the Institute of the Oriental Studies, Academy of Sciences. There are two bibliographies on books and journal articles. We use here the latter one. The number of articles amounts to 730. Some of them data back to the 1870s but most articles were published in recent years, that is, 233 in the 1970s, 160 in the 1960s and 149 in the 1980s. The decrease in the 1980s probably reflects the political sit uation. If we look into the situation before the war, we find 20 in the 1910s but 10 in the 1920s and only 7 in the 1930s. This could be caused also by the bad relationships between Japan and Russia at those times.
If we classify the articles according to their fields, we get the following figures : 231 in grammar, 158 in vocabulary, 94 in general subjects, 66 in writing, 58 in the history of Japanese and 40 in phonetics. Now let's compare these with the results of the papers written in European languages and published in Japan (after the war) : 328 in phonetics, 112 in grammar, 32 in general subjects, 20 in vocabulary, 12 in writing and 5 in the history of Japanese. This means a strong inclination of papers in European languages toward phonetisc and grammar and very few are in other fields. Many papers in phonetics are written by researchers in natural scienses and, as they regard international comprehension very important, they tend to write the papers in European (mainly English) languages.