Attitudes Toward African–American Vernacular English: A US Export to Japan?

Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine attitudes towards African–American vernacular English (AAVE) in a setting outside of the USA. Because foreign attitudes toward AAVE can serve as an indirect assessment of a society's racial prejudice, we decided to explore these attitudes in Japan: a country with an intriguing mix of ties that are both close (i.e. politically and economically) and distant (i.e. culturally) vis-à-vis the USA. Considering the ostensible similarities in racial beliefs widely held in both countries, we hypothesised that evaluations of AAVE in Japan would be comparable to those in the USA. We found that the evaluations expressed by a sample of Japanese college students were virtually indistinguishable from the overall pattern of AAVE evaluations made by US Americans and recommend additional research in order to better understand the nature of contemporary Japanese attitudes towards different varieties of English.

Keywords:

• speaker evaluations
• language attitudes
• African–American Vernacular English
• Japanese cultural groups