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HISTORY

The National Language Research Institute was founded in 1948 to provide the organization and facilities for scientific research on the Japanese language. Following the end of World War II there was a great demand for reform in the written language to meet the needs of a rapidly changing society. Thus some of the earliest projects undertaken at the Institute stressed literacy and the written language, and the results provided data on which language reform was based. Such projects brought together specialists in language, education, sociology and statistics in a cooperative approach that was unique at the time. From this early period the Institute has also been an innovator in developing techniques for handling massive quantities of linguistic and statistical data.

The Institute itself is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, and much of its reseach has gone to meet the needs which led to its establishment, yet the Institute itself is an autonomous organization and the actual reseach projects are adopted by its own Research Planning Committee. The Institute has gradually grown and expanded its research program. Some of the noteworthy projects carried out have been: Developmental studies of language use by children; a survey of dialect forms resulting in the six-volume Linguistic Atlas of Japan; a stady of language use in Tsuruoka City examining how the use of standard and dialect forms have changed over 24-year intervals; and sociological studies of the use of respect language. The Institute also mainintains comprehensive data on all linguistic research done on Japanese, which is published yearly as the Kokugo Nenkan, and work is in progress on gathering material for a citation dictionary of the Japanese language. Since the mid-1970's, the Center for Teaching of Japanese as a Second Language has been active in instructor training, development of teaching materials, and contrastive linguistic research.

Address: 3-9-14, Nisigaoka, Kita-ku, Tokyo 115-8620, Japan
Fax number: 81-3-3906-3530


Copyright The National Language Research Institute
update: 2000-05-22

ykumagai@kokken.go.jp