2023, Vol., No.75

The Japanese Language Association of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.0

pISSN : 1229-7275
https://journal.kci.go.kr/jlak

In the mid 20th century an English-based pidgin commonly referred to Bamboo English was used first in post-war occupied Japan by American military and Japanese locals, and later on the Korean peninsula as American soldiers and local people there had increasing contact. No in-depth studies of it have been published mainly because of the paucity of linguistic data. This paper seeks to shed light on its grammatical structure through quantitative analyses, namely producing three scatter plots and thrice calculating Pearson’s r correlation coefficients. These are made for 44 individual sentences in Bamboo English, with the x values being the sequential numbers of the morphemes in the original Bamboo English sentence and the y values being the re-ordered numbers of morphemes in the Standard English, Japanese and Korean translations, respectively. The results showed that the majority of the BE sentences were grammatically similar (similar morpheme order) to English. This is to be expected since, after all, BE is pidginized English and not pidginized Japanese or pidginized Korean. Nonetheless seven (or around 15%) of the 44 sentences had morpheme order which is unexplainable by English. Many (though significantly all of these) do indeed seem to reflect the syntactic influence of the substrata (i.e. Japanese and Korean) languages. Finally, we note that BE differs from many pidgins worldwide in that we do not find “tertiary usage”, that is BE was not used a lingua franca by Japanese and Koreans to communicate with one another. Nonetheless, it is possible that the strong grammatical influence of the substrata languages on this pidgin may be due to the morpheme order similarities inherent in Japanese and Korean.

Due to rapid globalization and massive population movements in recent decades, the number of children growing up in plurilingual and pluricultural environments has increased globally. This paper focuses on these children and discusses the heritage language education for them from the viewpoint of post-structuralism and social constructivism. The life-stories of three persons who were raised in Korean, Japanese and other languages from childhood are analyzed by using an analytical concept, ‘Children Crossing Borders’(CCB). CCB is a concept which I have made to explore the mobile lives of those children who have been raised in plurilingual and pluricultural environments. CCB means not the children themselves but the experiences and memories of the children in relation to spatial mobility, linguistic mobility, and language-education category mobility. After the considerations on the three life-stories by the concept of CCB, it is found that the experiences and memories of children are formed and differently implied in relation to spatial mobility, linguistic mobility, and language-education category mobility. Within the field of the heritage language education, the subjective world of the children on the move has not been examined in detail. But it is necessary for us to recognize and engage with multiple trajectories in space, time, and place, to reflect on how mobile individuals interact with people throughout their lives and to try to understand their subjective world of everyday rather than look at their lives as static domestic residents in one country and only by line of decent or within the context of their heritage language education.

Until Korean society began to change its orientation toward a multicultural society in the mid-2000s, Koreans had generally been used to believing in a myth of being a single-race and single-language nation. In the background of such changes, there were realities of social changes such as extremely low birth rates, rapid aging of the population, and rapid increases of multicultural families composed of immigrant workers, international marriage families, and North Korean defectors. Even though top-down policies for multiculturalism have continuously been announced, the transition towards a multicultural society has not been so streamlined and there remained a lot of problems. International marriage in Korea drastically increased in the 2000s. As international marriage between Korea and Japan increased, children of Korea-Japan international marriages have also increased. Heritage Japanese language education for children born in the family of Korea-Japan international marriages can be divided into family-centered education and extra-family education. Besides family-centered heritage education, there are three extra-family educations such as public schools, support centers for multi-cultural families, and volunteer self-help groups. Volunteer self-help groups are organized in their respective regions by family members in order to provide Japanese language education and experiences in Japanese culture for their children. It is confirmed that there are 40 such self-help groups in Korea. However, there are a lot of tasks to be solved such as insufficient education facilities and teachers, lack of curriculum and teaching methods and lack of class-management know-how. Such self-help groups urgently require support and empowerment. It is also necessary for such self-help groups to form networks between themselves, exchange information and provide mutual support.