Variability in Written Japanese: Towards a Sociolinguistics of Script Choice

Abstract

Literate Japanese today use a writing system comprising four script types, a plurality which affords a rich flexibility of orthographic choice. Japanese have come to stereotype script types and proportions with extralinguistic features of texts and their inscribers. Hence, women and men, the young and old, and the parochial and the sophisticated are understood distinctly to signal self-identity, audience identity and genre features through script choice. In this study, widely-held associations between script types, genres, writers and target readers are tested via statistical analyses of script use in popular Japanese fiction. Texts are also subjected to lexical analysis to see whether choice of vocabulary alone can account for variability in script selection. Results indicate that, at least in the domain of modern, public texts, Japanese writers fashion their script type choices to specific contexts, as the writing systems allows, for sociolinguistic and stylistic ends. By utilizing a micro-level, correlational approach, this project is intended to expand our understanding of writing systems and practices as independent channels for expressions of creativity, social self-identity and cultural forms.