sign language
alternate language

mother tongue
first language
native language
foreign language
ancestral language
second language

autochthonous language
indigenous language
immigrant language
colonial language
pidgin language
creole language
heritage language

official language
"de jure" official language
"de facto" official language

What do we call a pattern of speech which is characteristic of a particular person?

An idiolect.

A dialect.

A sociolect.

An accent.

To which dialect area do you belong?
Does your speech mark you as being from a particular social group?
Does your speech have any special quirks which make you special?
Do you speak any languages with a nonstandard accent?

A multilingual person is able to use more than just one language. Almost everyone in Japan is multilingual to some extent. A multilingual person is often said to have a dominant language, but even the skills in the nondominant languages can be native or nativelike.

A bilingual person is able to use two languages. Sometimes we mean "at least two" languages, and other times we mean "only two" languages. We also tend to use the term "bilingual" whenever the relationship between two particular languages is important; e.g., as when we are looking for a "bilingual" translator for German and Italian, or when we need an interpreter for two-way simultaneous interpreting.

A diglossic individual is the typical bilingual person of a diglossic community, which is a community where two languages are regularly used for communication. One of the languages is typically a "high" language, and the other is a "low" language. For example, the high language might be used for religious, scientific, or other scholarly discussion, whereas the low language might be used for shopping and light entertainment. Examples of diglossia include the use of both Bokmaal and Landsmaal in Norway, the use of both Spanish and Guarani in Paraguay, and the use of both English and Patois in Jamaica.

We sometimes refer to the following contrasts when describing a person's ability in a particular language:

first versus second language (cf. mother tongue)

native versus nonnative (cf. critical period)

nativelike versus foreign sounding

fluent versus halting

grammatical versus ungrammatical

Not everyone in a multilingual community is multilingual. Multilingual communities are the result of human migration, and there are various types of multilingual communities. This migration has typically resulted in contact between speakers of different languages, and such contact can result in speaker multilingualism, language change, new language birth, and even language extinction.

Habitat can (1) develop vocabulary (adaptive strategy), (2) guide speaker migration, and (3) protect minority languages (linguistic refuges). Examples include:

(1) Spanish, Scottish Gaelic, and Romanian all have rich mountain vocabularies. English, on the other hand, has good wetland vocabulary.

(2) Semitic speakers have favored arid places, and Indo Europeans temperate places. Hungarian speakers seem to have followed the grass. Indo-Europeans seem to have prefered the black soil of the Ganges-Indus plain, while Dravidian speakers were left with the drier red soil.

(3) Linguistic refuge areas include mountains (Georgian, Basque, Quechua), tundra (Lappish, Evenki, Inukitut), deserts (Khoisan Bushman), and islands (Maltese, Gullah).

Vocabulary adaptation has contributed greatly to language diversity. Differences in vocabulary can hinder translation and have other commercial consequences.

Historical migrations have juxtaposed languages from diverse linguistic and cultural groups, and this has sometimes caused social tension.

Many modern nation-states have minority groups living in remote areas. Locally dominant minorities may present special problems for the nation's central policy planners.

Multilingual people must constantly choose to use a particular language from their linguistic repertoires. There are four considerations which often guide this choice of language use.

(1) prestige: choose so that others will think highly of you

(2) practicality: choose so that you can communicate and interact more easily with others

(3) pride: choose so that you can show others your own way of speaking

(4) punishment: avoid a language which is forbidden

(1) speaker by speaker, with individuals adopting the change in no obvious social or stylistic pattern

(2) from group to group, with some groups in the community adopting the change before others

(3) from style to style, with individuals adopting the change in some usage situations and then later in other usage situations

 

Long ago, Japan was a patchwork of languages and dialects. Most likely, the dominant families were Altaic and Austronesian. Five theories of the origin of Japanese:

• a language isolate, with no extant relatives (popular, but unlikely)
• an Altaic language, like Korean and Ainu (good evidence)
• an Austronesian language, as in Formosa (some evidence)
• a Dravidian language, as in southern India (silly!)
• a creole language, born in northern Kyushu (a good possibility)

By the 1500s, the primary languages of Japan were Ainu, Japanese, and Ryukyuan, each with several distinct dialects. The Shogunate maintained a network of samurai who could translate the local ways of speaking.

Meiji imperialism began the promotion of a single "kokugo". Immigrants learned "Japanese" as a second language; however, trade pidgins (e.g., Yokohama Pidgin) continued to flourish in the communities of foreigners who were short-term residents.

As the Japanese nation-state began to assert itself internationally, Japanese officials and professionals learned more foreign languages. English, German, and French were popular among bankers and businessmen; as well as in the military. Chinese, Dutch, German, French, and English have all been used in medical discourse, although the particular language of preference has changed over the years.

In the Fascist era, Japanese regional speech varieties were discouraged in favor of kokugo. Although regional varieties were not eliminated, Japan's excellent system of universal education, and later radio, greatly homogenized the speech of people across Japan.

The concept of kokugo which emerged over the Meiji-Taisho-Showa years was that standard Japanese was the language of Japan. Other ways of speaking were either foreign languages or "nonlanguages". As a result, resident Chinese and Koreans faced less pressure to abandon their languages than did the Ainu and the Okinawans.

For many people, the words "indigenous" and "autochthonous" have the same meaning, and dictionaries typically reflect this.  Some writers seem to have a stylistic preference for one word over the other; however, for all writers, "indigenous language" and "autochthonous language" both refer to the native language of an area.  Nevertheless, in careful writing about multilingual areas, these two words can be used to make an important distinction, as described below.

An indigenous language of a country is a language which is "native" to that country. The country may be the "birthplace" of the language (e.g., as England is the birthplace of English; or as Papua is the birthplace of Tok Pisin). Alternatively, however, the language may be simply a native language of the country's inhabitants. Typically, an indigenous language is one which was spoken in the country before the era of European colonialism.

Although an indigenous language has often been in the country for a long time, this is not always true. For example, the Bantu languages which are now indigenous to South Africa originally came from West Africa via migration. On the other hand, the Khoisan languages have been spoken in South Africa for a much longer time.

The word "autochthonous" can be used to distinguish the older indigenous languages from the newer indigenous languages. We can think of a country's autochthonous language as being "as old as the hills". For example, standard Japanese and Ainu are both indigenous to Hokkaido; however, because the Ainu language has been spoken there much longer, we may describe Ainu as the autochthonous language of Hokkaido.

As far as we know, English was the first language to be spoken by a community in Ogasawara. Therefore, English may be described as the indigenous language of Ogasawara. However, the English-speaking community in Ogasawara began in the 19th Century, which is not very long ago (linguistically, that is), so we do not say that English is the "autochthonous" language of Ogasawara.

Many migrations have spread languages in earlier times, so there are many countries which now have both older and newer indigenous language communities. The autochthonous languages are the really old languages which did not arrive in the country by any known migration.