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Japanese language maintenance and change in the linguistic landscapes of Korean “young people streets”: From the viewpoint of diversity and the strength of attitudes

  • The Japanese Language Association of Korea
  • Abbr : JLAK
  • 2022, (72), pp.145-165
  • DOI : 10.14817/jlak.2022.72.145
  • Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Received : April 7, 2022
  • Accepted : May 27, 2022
  • Published : June 20, 2022

Lee,Soonhyeong 1

1경북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we focus on how changes in social conditions and values, such as the difficulties in face-to-face retail selling as a result of the covid pandemic, and the boycott of Japanese products under the "NO JAPAN" slogan, are reflected in language landscapes. In specific, our purpose is to examine the linguistic landscapes of shopping streets in Korea frequented by young people, from the perspective of the degree of "diversity" and the intensity of people’s feelings of intractability, in an effort to shine light on phenomena of changes and maintenance in Japanese usage. The results of our analyses may be summed up as follows. 1.In unique linguistic landscapes such as signs incorporating Japanese place names and regional specialties, those that utilize Japanese sentence structures, and those that use Japanese-style shop names and trademark logos, we find a great diversity in the use of kanji, hiragana, katakana, romaji, and hangul, revealing a strong particularity of attitudes. In particular, we find that attempts to produce a Japanese aura, as well as the use of imagery through store names and trademark logos play a strong symbolic role similar to that of pictograms. 2.With signs promoting a shop’s longevity such as “since 20xx”, and signs containing words targeted for eradication in the language purification movement, we find little diversity, but the former serve a practical purpose and the use of the latter in shop names reveals the strength of a desire to create a sense of authentic Japanese-ness. 3.Compared with the pre-covid era, we find a strong tendency towards signs that blindly and unquestioningly sought to purge hiragana on the one hand, and those which flexibly made use of Romanization or resourcefully disguised Japanese words as Korean by writing them in hangul (quasi-Korean signs). These opposing trends of “flexible resourcefulness” and “blindly following the crowd” demonstrate that change and maintenance of Japanese linguistic landscapes reflect its ability to interpret the zeitgeist and go with the flow. In conjunction with psychological and sociological factors, we conclude that from an economic standpoint, the use of Japanese is no longer useful in increasing sales.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.