Heritage Language Maintenance in Old and New Japanese Communities in Mexico

This paper reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant communities in Mexico City (old pre-war labour migrants and new recent self-movers). We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities among social variables, namely age, generation, sex, identity, education, mass media, language importance, language used at home and work and contact with community members in Mexico as well as relatives and friends in their homeland, Japan.

The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of the heritage language in both old and new migrant communities, while highlighting the community-specific effects of both age and languages used in the workplace among the old community and those of contact with the homeland in the case of the newcomer community. We argue that these differences indicate that in the older community, where a strong solidarity network has been developed but where contact with the homeland has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help pre-war migrants maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of high language ability.

This paper concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whilst different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with the homeland, may aid its preservation depending upon the recency of the community’s arrival as well as the strength of the community’s network.