PALAUAN JAPANESE PROJECT
I have been investigating the language structure of Japanese speakers in Palau, in collaboration with Professor David Britain of Bern University. Two topics that interest us in particular are Japanese dialect contact and the structural obsolescence of that variety in the terminal Japanese speech community in Palau.
Given that Palau was a settlement colony during the Japanese regime where Japanese migrants to Palau came from many different parts of Japan and undoubtedly were speakers of quite radically different varieties, we have been considering the extent to which models of dialect contact (e.g., Trudgill 1986, 2010, Britain 2002, 2018, Britain and Trudgill 1999) can account for the structure of Palauan Japanese.
Since all former Japanese settlers were eventually expatriated from Palau to Japan and since the official language has been replaced from Japanese to English, we are also investigating whether, structurally, the L2 Japanese spoken in Palau is dying in the same way as first language varieties are known to obsolesce (e.g., Dorian’s 1981 work on East Sutherland Gaelic). A real-time study (both panel and trend studies) of linguistic obsolescence in this Japanese koine after twenty years is currently underway.
