449.2
Survey of Standardization in Tsuruoka, Japan
Comparison of results from four surveys conducted at 20-year intervals
YONEDA Masato, MIZUNO Yoshimichi, MAEDA Tadahiko, ABE Takahito.
The present study briefly reports the result of “Survey of Standardization in Tsuruoka” (hereafter abbreviated as SST). SST is a cooperative research project between National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics since 1950, when the first survey was administered in central area of Tsuruoka, a local city in Tohoku district, Japan. Since then the project has been repeated at about twenty-year intervals (we administered the fourth survey in the fall of 2011). This project aims at describing the process of language standardization in Tsuruoka in both societal and individual levels.
SST is a combination of Area survey and Panel survey. In the Area survey, informants were sample randomly drawn in each survey occasion from the residential register of the target area. The aim of the Area survey is to capture the standardization process in societal level. In the Panel survey, respondents of the first, second and third Area surveys were followed up in the subsequent occasions and asked to answer to the same items. The aim of the panel survey is to investigate the typology of life-span linguistic change in individual level.
The sample size for the Area survey in fourth SST was 700 and number of respondents was 466 (response rate 66%). Panel survey in the fourth SST consists of three groups, four-time repeaters from the first survey, three-time repeaters from the second survey, and the two-time repeaters from the third survey. The total of the eligible sample for three groups was 437 and the number of respondents was 333 (response rate 76%).
In the presentation, we will report on selected results of the fourth survey on several items.