A new type of Contact Language which developed in an area with no native speakers: Field Research on Angaur Japanese

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520502
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo Metropolitan University
• Principal Investigator: Long Daniel 首都大学東京, 人文科学研究科(研究院), 教授 (00247884)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): Konishi Junko 沖縄県立芸術大学, 音楽学部, 教授 (70332690) ; Imamura Keisuke 長崎大学, 多文化社会学部, 戦略職員 (00732679)
• Research Collaborator: Saito Keita 首都大学東京, 人文科学研究科, 博士後期課程2年
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 言語接触 / 接触言語 / 自然習得 / 残存日本語 / 日本語のディアスポラ / pidginoid / 準ピジン / ピジノイド

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research discovered the existence of a variety of Japanese spoken on the Palauan island of Angaur (Angaur Japanese, AJ) which has continued to be used and even passed down from one generation to the next in the absence of native speakers of Japanese. In the sense that it has no native speakers AJ resembles pidgin more than creole, but the population of the island all speak the same language (Palauan) so Angaur Japanese does not not serve a lingua franca function like pidgins. AJ shows dramatic grammatical simplifications and lexical reductions like a pidgin, but the communicative abilities of users of the variety go well beyond what one would expect of people who had neither studied Japanese formally nor spent extended periods around native speakers. Rather Angaur Japanese is the simplified Japanese acquired by the postwar generation from their bilingual parents. Because of the similarities with the creole-creoloid dichotomy, we propose the name "pidginoid" for this variety.

Free Research Field

社会言語学