Kazuhide's Linguistic Myths

By Matthew Ward | Sunday, Jul 13, 2008

In college, I majored in TESOL. As such, I ended up taking a fair number of linguistics classes. I ended up really loving studying linguistics, and so I've kept on studying on my own throughout my life. I'm the kind of person who will actually buy linguistics textbooks to read for entertainment—a little weird, I know, but different strokes for different folks, no? Despite all of this, I'm very far from being any kind of expert on language, but I have picked up a fair amount of information about over the years.

 Anyway, if you are anything like me, you'll probably know the experience of regularly hearing very widely held beliefs about language that are actually quite wrong. These myths vary a bit from society to society, but many of them are surprisingly similar from culture to culture. There's actually a great little book called “Linguistic Myths,” featuring a collection of essays by prominent linguists, that manages to, in a humorous, readable and unpretentious way, explore a number of these myths. I really recommend it to anyone interested in linguistic issues.

One thing pointed out in the foreword to “Linguistic Myths” is that the amount of information about language has expanded exponentially in the last half-century, and linguists have done an unusually poor job of communicating this information to the general public, resulting in many people having deeply-held ideas about language that have little relation to fact.

Anyway, you're probably wondering what the heck all of this has to do with Kazuhide. For those who don't know, “Ask Kazuhide” is a funny column in Japanzine that basically features a crotchety, bigoted old Japanese guy who gives funny and very un-PC answers to questions by clueless gaijin. Of course, actually, Kazuhide's answers are presumably written by smartass foreigners, but they do a pretty good job of being funny and parodying certain aspects of both Japanese culture and reactions to it by non-Japanese. In last month's “Ask Kazuhide,” the old guy discussed language a bit. Of course, it's the usual ridiculous stuff, but, intentionally or otherwise, it did a pretty good job of bringing up several linguistic myths in a very short space. As follows:

 Japanese Language

Sam

by Sam on Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:25 pm

Hello Kazu,
With so many Japanese teens using phones and emails to write Japanese it seems (after talking to many) that they are losing the ability to write Kanji and with so many foreign words now intrenched into the Japanese language, how long will the language last?

Top

Re: Japanese Language

by Kazuhide on Tue Jun 10, 2008 5:39 am

Dear Sam,
Not longer much now. Even I, great Japanese traditions man, am writing English in magazine right now. This is future the world: International Bloken Engrish.

 

OK, I can count at least 5 linguistic myths here, one of them specific to Japan, the others quite common in many cultures. As follows:

 

1. Technology is making people unable to write kanji:

 

Actually, the truth is a lot more complicated than this. One thing that is clear: technology is reducing people's ability to handwrite Chinese characters, for the same reason that spellcheck programs affect spelling skills in English: you don't have to remember how to handwrite them so much anymore, because machines to it for you. With word-processors (and cellphones, etc.), all you need to do is know the sound of the word and recognize is what the character looks like (which is much easier than writing it by hand), and voila, you can write it. In other words, technology is actually making it easier to write kanji as long as you're using some kind of electronic device. Parodoxically, this also makes them more difficult to remember how to write when you don't have a writing device around, but since most people are writing with machines these days, there are some who believe that the use of kanji is actually increasing in written Japanese.

To give a good example of why this is so: I love to eat crab, but if I was handwriting Japanese, I'd have to write it in kana as ??, because the kanji character happens to be tricky to remember and write. No such problem with a wapuro (word-processor): all I have to do is write kani in romaji or ?? in kana and the character ? comes up on the screen. In other words, word-processors make me more able to write kanji.

 

The same process works for Japanese teens: look over their shoulders when they are furiously tapping away at their cellphones on the train, and you'll see a lot of Chinese characters coming up on the screen. This is because a lot of difficult characters that might otherwise be written in kana if they were passing each other notes in class can be easily written in kanji via phonetic input on a cellphone. It can even save money: some services charge more for longer messages, and using more kanji means that you can write shorter messages with the same amount of content. I can remember, when cellphone e-mail first started getting common, my wife's mother wrote her an all-hiragana message, and my wife and her 20-something friends laughed at it “Look, your poor old mom doesn't know how to convert to hiragana to kanji!” In other words, not using kanji in electronic communication can actually have a fuddy-duddy connotation. Of course, some of these teens end up choosing the wrong characters when they are phonetically inputing them, with humorous results (kind of like English-speaking teens spelling “loser” as “looser”), but then again, even adults have long have been prone to these kinds of mistakes.

 

There have actually been concerns expressed by educators in recent years that the ease of using Chinese characters in e-mail and word-processors have increased the number of kanji used in Japanese. Despite the official policy of trying to keep the written language relatively simple at 2000-odd characters, the fear is that the simplification of the written Japanese language that was carried out by the 20th century script reform movement may be undone by technology. So, what we're really seeing is an increase in kanji use, coupled with a decrease in ability to handwrite the ideographs. All in all, these two trends combined may well be something to be concerned about, but it's not exactly as simple as “they are losing their ability to write kanji.”

 

2. People can't read and write as well as they used to:

 

Contrary to popular perception, in most modern societies, overall literacy levels are actually higher than they have ever been. Most complaints about a decline in literacy assume that there was some kind of golden age of literacy in the past. Actually, the golden age never existed. Before the advent of universal education, most people in most societies were illiterate, but overall literacy rates have been climbing ever since. Western people traveling to Japan in past centuries reported surprisingly high levels of literacy, especially considering that Japanese was even more difficult to read and write back then, but it is important to remember that these people were generally comparing Japan to their own societies, which were almost overwhelmingly illiterate. Japanese teens today may have little interest or ability to read ancient Japanese literature, and they may find it harder to handwrite kanji than their parents did, but they almost certainly have higher overall literacy rates than teenagers did 100, 200 years or even 50 years ago.

 

2. Changes in people's ability to read or write reflect on the overall health of a language:

 

Obviously, literacy is very important in modern society, and people have good reasons to be concerned about it. However, there is a common misconception that problems with literacy indicate some kind of state of ill health with the language in general. We can see this above when “Sam” connects the ability of teens to write kanji with the future of the Japanese language. Actually, even if teenagers do have a problem with writing Chinese characters, it wouldn't have much bearing on the overall health of the Japanese language.

 

Let's say that Japanese teenagers did lose their ability to read and write in kanji, and Japanese had to be written all in kana or romaji in the future Would that spell doom for the Japanese language? Abandoning kanji certainly didn't seem to hurt Vietnamese, and greatly reducing its use doesn't seem to have hurt Korean. When Turkey modernized in the early 20th century, the script was changed from Arabic to Latin, so in essence the old Turkish writing system was replaced and no longer exists, but the spoken Turkish language, of course, is alive and well today.

 

Basically, the Japanese writing system really isn't the same thing as the Japanese language: it (and all other writing systems) is a highly artificial cultural invention that is is loosely based on the spoken language. Changing or replacing the writing system would thus have little effect on the status of the spoken language.

 

4). Foreign loanwords are damaging to a language:

 

“Sam” obviously thinks that the continuing incursion of foreign loanwords into Japanese somehow comprises another threat to the language. The idea that foreign loanwords damage or corrupt a language is one of the most popular and widely held linguistic myths of all, but it is also one of the easiest to disprove. On one hand, people often become understandably disturbed when large numbers of foreign words are imported into their language, and it makes them feel threatened that the language is somehow diluted and perhaps will somehow be overwhelmed by alien words. However, the fact remains that all languages change and all languages import foreign words. If foreign words were damaging to a language, English should by all rights be on its last legs. I've heard examples of what English would sound like using only its original Germanic vocabulary, and it sounds downright bizarre: check this out for an example:

 

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/69250bac6c7cbaff

 

As for Japanese has been importing enormous numbers of words from Chinese (a language as different from Japanese as English is) for most of the last 1500 years, so it's very difficult to see how borrowing words from English or other European languages is damaging Japanese now.

 

5). Japanese and other major languages are threatened by English:

 

A lot of people have heard that about half the world's languages are slated to disappear in the next century, and the media (especially the English-language media) is extremely fond of constantly reminding us of how dominant English has become worldwide. In the minds of the public, these two issues have become closely connected: English is the most dominant international language the world has ever known, and languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, so this must be all because of English, right?

 

Well, actually, not really. Certainly, there are a number of languages in danger of being replaced by English: these are languages like Hopi, Irish Gaelic and Australian Aboriginal languages, all of which are spoken in countries where English is the dominant native language. But, most endangered languages in the world are not being threatened by English, but rather by other dominant languages. For example, the threatened languages in Japan are Ainu and various Okinawan dialects. They are being threatened by standard Japanese, not English.

 

What is really happening to the world's languages is that a relatively small number of powerful languages are becoming even more dominant at the expense of most other languages. As this happens, those dominant languages gain even more native speakers and become even more powerful (and even less likely to disappear in the foreseeable future). This process has little to do with English, which continues to grow as a second and foreign language, but is fairly stagnant as a native language.

 

In fact, the proportion of native English speakers in the world's population has actually been falling for decades, and is projected to keep falling at least through the middle of this century. In the 1950's, native English speakers accounted for around 9% of the world's population. These days, high estimates of the number of native English speakers put the total at around 400 million people, which, in a world where there are currently around 6.7 billion people, puts the percentage of native English speakers at around 6%. That's right, all this time you've been hearing about how English is just crushing all other languages, it's actually been shrinking, in relative terms, as a native language. Yes, the total number of native speakers of English is growing, but not nearly as fast as the total world population is. This is mostly because native English speakers tend to have small families as compared speakers of languages like Spanish, Arabic and Hindi; most of the still-explosive growth in the world's population has not occurred among native English speakers. Given this trend, it's hard to imagine how large, dominant languages like Japanese could be threatened by English in the near future.

 

Given that most new English speakers are non-native speakers (a trend that looks certain to continue), and given that non-native speakers of any given language do have a tendency to speak in what could be called in a “broken” way, Kazuhide's “International Bloken English” is very likely to be a major factor in the world's linguistic future. It doesn't mean, however, that that's all everybody will be speaking.

 

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Matthew Ward's Profile

Late 30's, have lived in Asia for a lot of my life.

Interests: Music, politics, linguistics, learning languages, culture, food, traveling.

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