Customer Reviews

The Languages of Japan (Cambridge Language Surveys)

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Shibatani's book "the Languages of Japan" is now 10 years old, but it still proves to be an excellent resource not only for the weathered linguist, but for anyone with any interest in Japanese, Ainu, and their various dialects.

This edition gives a concise overview of Ainu and Japanese from phoentics to semantics and more. I found the chapter on Japanese dialects especially fascinating, and the first half of the book that is dedicated to Ainu is one of the most comprehensive modern works on the language of Japan's indigineous peoples.

This volume is small and thus limited in its content, but overall it still remains a valuable and excellent resource for linguists and language buffs.

Linguists (especially English-speaking ones) would do well to look to the Japanese language and test their theories against it *first* before making o'erhasty generalizations about language. I turned to this book after reading Anna Wierzbicka's work on 'semantic universals' and found that it validated my ideas that there is no exact equivalent in the Japanese language for the English word 'you' (or 'Du' in German, 'tu' in French, etc.). However, Shibatani's work is enjoyable and very informative. Non-linguists can (I think) understand it without much difficulty, and students of Japanese (as well as native speakers!) may enjoy his overview of the history and development of the language. He also goes out of his way to disprove certain 'myths' about Japanese. Plus it has a bibliography of works in both Japanese and English.

I sincerely hope more books of this kind will emerge.

The section on Ainu was very good, although not as thorough as the Japanese section.

One glaring omission was a section on the Ryukyuan languages. According to the author, it's "been proven" recently that Ryukyuan is actually just a "dialect of Japanese". This couldn't be farther from the truth.

The native languages of the Ryukyu Islands cannot be understood by people from the Japanese mainland. If the language native to the Ryukyus is indeed a dialect of Japanese, it is far more divergent from the standard language than any other Japanese "dialect". A story told in Ryukyuan could not be understood by most Tokyoites. A story told in Amami (the northernmost of the Ryukyuan languages) would even be difficult for a speaker of the Kagoshima dialect of Japanese (the southernmost) to understand.

The Okinawan language is as different from Tokyo Japanese as is Spanish from Italian, probably more like Swedish from German. The same can be said of all of the other Ryukyuan languages.

According to the author, the reason Ryukyuan is just a dialect is because of its historical relationship to Japanese. The same can be said of Swedish and German or Spanish and French with similar circumstances. In addition, they're all spoken in the nation of Japan... but so what? Catalan, Spanish, Asturian, Aragonese, and Galician are all closely related (even more closely than the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese), they are all native to Spain, and yet they are considered separate languages by all linguists and most laypeople as well.

The way equal treatment is not given to Ainu and Japanese is not a good thing and would take between half a star and a star off. The treatment of Ryukyuan is *extremely* disappointing and would take one or two stars off. Also disappointing is the lack of discussion of dialectal variation of each feature.

What *is* written is written well, however, and this book is a very wonderful reference for Ainu and a good one for Japanese, too. As a reference for the languages of Japan, it's 2/3rds the book it claims to be.

One reviewer claims that languages and dialects are differentiated by political divisions only. This is not true. In linguistics, languages and dialects are differentiated by the standard of mutual intelligibility: can speakers of one variety understand speakers of the other? For Ryukyuan languages and Japanese, the answer is a resounding "no". Examples to this abound in other countries: in Spain, there are Galician, Catalan, Spanish, Asturian, etc., all are considered separate languages because mutual intelligibility is difficult; in Portugal, there are Portuguese, Mirandese, Extremaduran, and Galician, all considered separate languages despite a close relationship and being spoken in the same country.

Even if they are merely "dialects", they are spoken by over 1 million Japanese people, and they are wildly different from Japanese, so in a book called "The Languages of Japan", they definitely deserve more than the 7 pages they get.

Some might defend Shibatani's poor treatment of Ainu, claiming that there's little information available on it anyways, and that what we do know is too little too late because Ainu is extinct.

This couldn't be farther from the truth. There are still over 200 native speakers of Ainu alive today (August 2005), including former Japanese Diet member Shigeru Kayano. There is also no lack of information on the Ainu language (most of it in Japanese, which is Shibatani's native language), including dictionaries, grammars, descriptions, stories in the language, textbooks teaching the language, songs in the language, and even FM Pipaus, a local radio station with broadcasts in and about the language. Shibatani did not make full use of the resources available to him, and the result is a poorly-written piece of [...].

This book is disappointingly deficient.

Masayoshi Shibatani's THE LANGUAGES OF JAPAN, an entry in the Cambridge Language Surveys series, covers but two languages within its pages: Ainu and Japanese. The book is especially valuable for its inclusion of the former, as until recently little scholarship had been done on English on this endangered minority language of northern Japan.

I was especially pleased with Shibitani's survey because it is refreshingly diachronic. His first concern in presenting each language is to summarize the various disagreements over genetic affiliation. Ainu's status as an isolate seems secure and theories relating it to other languages seem quaint, but Shibitani gives what seems to be cutting-edge evidence of Japanese as an Altaic superstratum on an Austronesian substratum. The development of the modern phonology out of earlier forms is also discussed, including the problem of the Old Japanese vowel system. There's also some discussion of the evolution of the lexicon, and which dialects retain what. There may be some outcry over Shibatani's decision to consider Ryukyuan a dialect of Japanese, but in forming the survey he seems to have decided to see Japan as having two main languages on the basis of the uncertain origin of each. Since Rykyuan and Japanese are from a common source, they are grouped together. In fact, Shibatani writes, "Once a genetic relationship is established between two languages, it is a moot point whether to regard them as two languages or as two dialects of the same languages." The work also includes a substantial synchronic discussion of general grammar and word-formation.

I felt that I, in spite of his attempt to clearly present these languages, I would have gotten far more out of the book if I had better Japanese. The book is not as suitable for hobby reading by the linguistics student as other entries in the Cambridge Language Survey series. Nonetheless, it's worth look at for those interested in Japanese and the little-documented (in English at any rate) Ainu language.

First, whether Ryukyuan is a "dialect" or a "separate" language is just a matter of semantics. As the author states, the only difference between the two is, in most cases, the presence of a separate government. In Japan's case, the Ryukuu islands are a part of Japan, and are therefore their old dialects are just dialects. Also, in the Japanese language, they are refered to as "hogan", which means "dialect" in English. If these islands were a separate nation, they would be a "different language", in the same way that Portuguese is a "different" (i.e., not a dialect) from Spanish. Ultimately, the thing to remember is that they are (were): 1. a closely related part of the small Japanese linguistic family, and 2. very difficult to understand for other Japanese speaking the other major dialects in northern, southern, and central Japan.

Anyway, I loved this book. After having learned Japanese, it was a pleasure to read an academic (but easy to understand) survey of the language, its dialects, and its history. Indeed, this book launched my amateur fascination with linguistics; perhaps someday I shall go so far as to get a degree in it. Now, I am reading an interesting book on African linguistics, but that calls for a separate review.

Defintely, buy this book! It is well worth the pocket change that they ask. The Ainu section is indeed a bit disappointing, but ultimately there was little information gathered on that language to begin with, and it is probably too late, since the language is essentially dead now.