An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
[contens]|
[previous]|
[next]
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.)
[contens]|
[previous]|
[next]