Educated Not to Speak Our Language: Language Attitudes and Newspeakerness in the Yaeyaman Language

ABSTRACT

The emergence of Indigenous language revitalization seeks to address historical domination over Indigenous peoples and to recover the loss of ancestral languages as embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper draws from long-term linguistic ethnographic research on one of the Indigenous Ryukyuan languages: Yaeyaman. I highlight one variety of Miyara Yaeyaman spoken in the village of Miyara on Ishigaki Island. Along with other Ryukyuan languages, it has been endangered and minoritized due to the suppression/assimilation policies following the dominant monolingual ideology in Japan. The aim of this research is to investigate existing theories of newspeakerness and language attitudes in sociolinguistic situations in Miyara and to attempt to examine prevailing ideologies. By using ethnographic data of Yaeyaman knowledge holders, I show that there is a lack of compatibility in language attitudes and beliefs between new speakers and traditional speakers of Miyaran. Through educational policy completely based on dominant values, Miyara community members are made to believe that our language is not sophisticated. Hence, we are “educated” not to speak our own language. As a conclusion, I present how language education policy in Japan—so far, a major cause of the problem of language endangerment—can become part of a possible solution to language endangerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Language attitude
• language revitalization
• linguistic ethnography
• newspeakerness
• policy as a problem and a solution
• symbolic domination
• Yaeyaman

Notes

1. Five or six, depending on researchers. Some of the dialects within these five or six languages are so different from one another that further subdivisions within each language could be justified on the basis of lack of mutual intelligibility.

2. This figure posits five languages, but the UNESCO Atlas of World Languages in Danger defines Kunigami as an additional sixth language (Moseley, 2010).

3. <T> refers to a teacher with a number representing each teacher who interviewed.

4. There is another word in Japanese, ben, which could mean dialect and is used as such.

5. <P> here refers to participants, with a number representing each participant. P2, P3 and P4 are traditional speakers of Miyaran, there were one younger speaker and one child in this video recording.

6. This high school is aimed at college, and there are no colleges on the Yaeyama Islands.

7. Miyara Tōsō was the first scholar from Yaeyama who criticised Tanabe Hisao’s claim that Yaeyama people have cultural and racial similarities with Malay in 1923.

8. Miki (2003) suggests that four important aspects of Yaeyaman identity are shaped by four components of its history (1) (a) the tragedy of head tax (jintōzei), which exploited Yaeyama locals during the Ryukyu Kingdom period; (b) the tragedy of forced migration within the Yaeyama archipelago during that period; (c) the tragedy of natural disasters such as typhoons and malaria; (d) the tragedy of the great tsunami in 1771.