Fieldnotes: English and French in Japan

It’s late November 2019 and I just returned from a two-week trip to Japan. I admit that on journeys such as these, the fieldworker in me tends to take over at times from the tourist or visitor, for Japan remains a stunningly interesting place for issues of language and globalization. I discussed a number of Japanese examples already in The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, now almost a decade ago, and my recent visit added new and rich linguistic landscape data to the voluminous collection I have built over the years.

Let me quickly reiterate the argument I developed earlier regarding the phenomenology of globalized languages such as English and French. I started from the observation that linguistically ‘incorrect’ forms of English and French account for a lot – perhaps most – of what we see of these languages in the world. It is too easy to dismiss such forms of language…