Impacts of Sociodemographic Factors on the Type of Regional Dialects Usage in Contemporary Japan

During the past few decades, attitude to regional dialects among Japanese is believed to have shifted toward positive, i.e. they now tend to use more regional dialects depending on situations in daily life, rather than always speaking in common language (lingua franca). Under these recent language climates, however, types of basic types of dialects usage in contemporary Japan is not well investigated and the typology is still to be scrutinized. In addition preceding studies have not fully discussed the impact of sociodemographic factors other than age, gender and geographic area on these types. In order to fill these critical gap in Japanese contemporary dialectology, we carried out a Web-based survey on an opt-in panel with a sample size of more than 10,000 Japanese individuals in 2015. Based on this survey, we will try to identify several types of regional dialects (and common language) usage in daily life, and to analyze the impact of sociodemographic factors on the membership to these types. The statistical method used is latent class analysis with or without covariates.

  Preliminary analyses suggest that we can assume more number of classes than the previous studies with smaller sample size have identified, and a few sociodemographic variables, such as “living in their land of origin or not”, may play a key role for describing the nature of these typology. We also discuss whether cultural capital has impact on the regional dialects usage or not.