The maintenance of Japanese as a heritage language in Mexico

Evidence from Japanese pre-war migrants and newcomers

Bibliographic Data

ID4179375
AuthorsKeiji Matsumoto (0000-0003-1235-655X, University of Tokyo , Tokyo , Japan, corresponding author), Naomi Tokumasu (University of Tokyo , Tokyo , Japan)
Year2022
Volume2022
Issue273
Pages81-101
Publication date2022-01-27
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of the Sociology of Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0165-2516 • E-ISSN: 1613-3668
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ijsl-2021-0008
OpenAlexW4213052507
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited12

This article reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant community in Mexico City - pre-war labour migrants and recent self-movers. We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities. The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of their 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 relatives and friends in Japan 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 relatives in Japan has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help them maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with their relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of their high language ability. This article concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whereas different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with relatives and friends in the homeland, may aid in its preservation, depending upon the recency of the community's arrival as well as the strength of community's network

Cultural heritage · Heritage language · Homeland · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Multilingual Education and Policy

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