An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute: A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/ HTML Version(1997)

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II.1.2 A Language Survey in Sirakawa City and in Neighboring Villages

(Report 2, 1950. 419 pages)
Sirakawa city, in Hukusima Prefecture, is 180 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. It was surveyed by the following team: IWABUTI Etutaro~, SIBATA Takesi, KITAMURA Hazime, UNO Yosikata, SIMAZAKI Minoru, YAMANOUTI Ruri, NAKAMURA Mitio, HAYASI Oki, ZYOKO Kan'iti, MORIOKA Kenzi, NAGANO Masaru, IITOYO Kiiti and SAIGA Hideo of the Institute; HAYASI Tikio, MARUYAMA Humiyuki, NISIHIRA Sigeyosi of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics; OTO Tokihiko, OMATI Tokuzo~ of the Institute of Folklore, and AOKI Tiyokiti, a student sent by Nagano Prefecture. Sirakawa, a former feudal city with a castle, had 32,000 inhabitants at the time of the survey. This small city is the economic center of the neighboring villages and belongs to the area of the To~hoku dialect. During the present survey, the following twelve factors were examined to determine the social factors at work in the use of the standard language: 1. Sex; 2. Age; 3. Occupation; 4. Social class; 5. School education; 6. Residential section; 7. Birthplace of parents; 8. Birthplace of informant; 9. Residential changes after the formative age of linguistic learning; 10. Frequency of the use of newspapers and radio; 11. Social attitude; 12. Consciousness of use of dialect and standard language. We found that the factors 8 and 9 exercise the greatest influence towards a greater use of the standard language, followed by 1, 2, 5 and 7 as secondary factors. To gauge the frequency of the use of the standard language, the survey team chose as a criterion the most striking phonological differences between the standard language and the To~hoku dialect. A new feature of the Sirakawa survey was the "24-hour survey" in which all the utterances of an individual during one day were recorded; as informants a farmer, a shopwoman and the owner of a beauty shop were chosen. We found that all three touched approximately 700 topics during the day; they used from 2,600 to 3,000 sentences, or between 8,500 and 10,000 bunsetu or pause groups. The farmer used 2,324 different words, and the shopwoman, 2,138. Though not described in this volume, another survey was carried out at that time in Sirakawa among the children from the Tokyo-Yokohama area evacuated to Sirakawa during the war, some remained in the city; we examined the degree in which they had assimilated the local dialect by the time of the survey, 5 or 6 years after the evacuation. We verified the hypothesis that the language patterns of the articulation and tonation of an individual are definitely fixed in the ages from 5-6 to 13-14; we called this the "formative age of linguistic learning." (See H. KITAMURA, "How Do Migrations Change Children's Language?" Gengo Seikatu, No. 80, May, 1958.)

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