Foreigner Talk or Foreignness: The Language of Westerners in Japanese Fiction

Abstract

The present study seeks, using a corpus of eight Japanese works of fiction, to identify if the speech patterns of Westerners in Japanese literature are related to the simplified register referred to as “foreigner talk,” i.e., the register used when addressing non-native speakers with low linguistic competence, and also if foreigner talk is commonly used in Japanese literature for addressing non-native speakers. It was found that, although all of the works somehow marked the nationality of the characters linguistically, for example by the use of foreign words – i.e., markers of “foreignness,” the language of the Westerners was rarely portrayed as “simplified.” When the language was depicted as simpler than that of the Japanese characters, the characters speaking were in most cases of minor importance to the story. In all of the works, however, the relative simplicity should be regarded as a tendency. Furthermore, there are works featuring Japanese characters using a simplified register when addressing foreigners, especially in first encounters between native speakers and foreigners.

The characteristics of simplified speech reported were in most cases of syntactic nature (like short sentences and repetitions for facilitating comprehension), while for example morphological simplifications rarely occurred. However, the differences from standard Japanese were not frequent enough to be called conventionalized.

Introduction

This paper, based on my undergraduate thesis in Japanese studies,¹ seeks to compare characteristics of how native speakers of Japanese address non-native speakers in reality – hereafter “primary foreigner talk” – as reported in previous research, to the speech style of non-native speakers in Japanese fiction – hereafter “secondary foreigner talk.”² Also the register used in fiction for addressing non-native speakers is treated. Connections between these phenomena have been reported in English, and here, the possibility of such relations in the Japanese language is discussed. Only fiction featuring Westerners (people with a Caucasian appearance) is treated here. My study pays focus to lexical, syntactical and morphological properties of foreigner talk, although discourse-level features (like redundancy) are discussed as well.

Firstly, the history of the language of Westerners in Japanese fiction is sketched, and the concept of foreigner talk (in general and in Japanese) is introduced. Then, the method and the material of my study are discussed. The major part of this paper concerns the findings of my study, discussing language characteristics thematically. Finally, my findings are discussed on a more general level, and possible topics for further studies are presented.³

Previous Studies

The speech style of foreign characters in Japanese fiction has previously been studied from the viewpoint of yakuwari-go, hereafter “role language” – the way in which readers can get a picture of fictional characters (their gender, ethnicity, etc.) judging from their speech style. People in reality do not necessarily use these speech styles – instead, readers learn to associate fictional speech styles to different kinds of characters due to consumption of media from young age.⁴ Role language has, however, often developed from actual historical language. This is also the case concerning the role language of Westerners.

In fiction written from the opening of Japan in 1853 until the Second World War, Westerners, as well as other foreign characters, are frequently portrayed speaking aru yo-kotoba – hereafter “aru yo-language” – a role language possible to trace back to the pidgin language known as Yokohama dialect/Japanese ports lingo. One of its most distinctive characteristics is the use of the verb of existence aru (“be”/“have”) as a copula, either in its plain form – aru – or in its polite form – arimasu. This role language was used frequently for depicting foreigners regardless of their ethnicity until the early twentieth century. It was also used for depicting Japanese speaking foreign languages badly.⁵ Later in the century, Chinese characters use plain forms more conventionally than before, while Western characters generally use polite forms/addressee honorifics. This is likely due to the Japanese territorial expansion during the early century, leading to the spread of Japanese-based pidgins featuring plain forms.⁶

Aru yo-language has become rather conventionally associated to Chinese characters, while Western characters do not use this speech style anymore. Westerners are, however, still depicted speaking a substandard form of Japanese, characteristized by:

• Mispronunciations (for example, deesu instead of desu)

• Frequent use of foreign words⁷ instead of their Japanese equivalents

• Typographical peculiarities, like using katakana instead of hiragana

These characteristics started to replace the old aru yo-language after the American occupation period in the 1950s, possibly due to a closer contact between Japanese and Westerners than before. One characteristic of aru yo-language is still frequent when Westerners talk in fiction, namely the polite speech style.⁸

Characteristics of the language of Westerners in fiction can be roughly divided into two groups. There are mere exoticisms not found in reality – hereafter termed “foreignness”. One example is the exclamatory oo, likely originating in nineteenth century translations of English literature. Since no direct equivalent exists in the Japanese language, this expression was just transcribed by the translators. Thus, the expression got a flavour of Westernness, and it is still used, even by Japanese authors depicting Westerners, for giving this flavour.⁹ Other peculiarities might be related to real life interaction with Westerners, like the polite speech style. It has been posited that this feature might be related to how Japanese and Westerners interact today. Partly because Japanese and Westerners often meet in formal situations like overseas trade, honorifics are frequently used when addressing Westerners. This could make Westerners believe that the polite style is the standard form of Japanese, possibly making politeness an easily recognizable characteristic for mimicking Westerners.¹⁰

This theory implies a connection between the primary foreigner talk used when addressing non-native speakers in reality and the secondary foreigner talk used by non-natives in fiction also in the Japanese language. Ferguson, the pioneer of foreigner talk studies, posited the existence of such a connection in English. Comparing simplified sentences addressed to non-native speakers (elicited using a questionnaire) to the language used by foreigners in a novel, he found features common to both primary and secondary foreigner talk, like dropping of the copula (We not afraid) and reduplications (talk-talk).¹¹

The origin of foreigner talk has been explained in several ways. Some scholars propose that native speakers, when using foreigner talk, revert to earlier stages in their language development. Other scholars regard foreigner talk as an imitation of broken speech.¹² Another theory claims that secondary foreigner talk has impact on how native speakers simplify language. In Ferguson’s study, where the informants reported simplifications which they were likely to do, this tendency was found,¹³ but in real life experiments, differences between primary and secondary foreigner talk have been reported. For example, the object form of the first personal pronoun (me) as a subject form in English is frequent in fiction, but it is not found in real life. This feature might be a translation loan from Roman languages.¹⁴ Other characteristics of foreigner talk reported by Ferguson, however, like omissions of form words, have been found also in experiments. These features might be triggered by, for example, the type of interaction and the language mistakes of the non-native speaker.¹⁵ Thus, when treating connections between primary and secondary foreigner talk in Japanese, the methods in real life experiments have to be taken into account, as is shown in Table 1.¹⁶

Table 1 Characteristics of foreigner talk (X=Frequent feature)

There are differences between the methods used, and also between the reported characteristics. For example, some studies report frequent stress of particles, while others report frequent particle omissions. Furthermore, these studies provide different theories on the origin of foreigner talk. Skoutarides and Uzawa regard foreigner talk as an accommodation to the language proficiency of the non-native speaker. Uzawa also proposes that foreigner talk is listener-oriented – native speakers try to become understood and give the listeners opportunities to speak. This results in clarifications and sentences with few coordinate forms.¹⁷ Sokolik, on the other hand, means that foreigner talk reflects language universals.¹⁸

It should also be noted that the features reported above are not ungrammatical Japanese, but they should rather be regarded as frequency differences when compared to the standard register. This was taken into account in my own study, as these possibly foreigner talk-related features, when found in fiction, can be connected to factors such as the individual style of the author. Thus, the language of the Western characters had to be compared to the language used by native speakers of Japanese in the studied fictional works.

Materials and Method

Eight works of fiction, featuring Westerners interacting with Japanese but written during different periods of the twentieth century and belonging to different genres, were studied as part of this research. As discussed above, previous studies treat different features of how foreign characters speak and what makes them recognizable as foreign characters. The connections between these speech styles and what is known about foreigner talk are, however, not treated. For this reason, the following works were chosen (Table 2):

Table 2 Studied works

Of course, this material does not give a complete picture of modern Japanese fiction. In particular, there is a gap between 1939 and 1982, and the modern works are comics while the older works are written in prose. Still, the works above were considered appropriate to study as they all represent different stereotypes about Westerners. Okamoto and Unno are mentioned by Kinsui¹⁹ as texts featuring speakers of aru yo-language, while Urasawa and Takeda & Koyama are quoted by Yoda²⁰ for examples of modern Westerner role language. Nagai and Tanizaki are noted authors for their treatment of the meeting between Japan and the West.²¹ Takahashi and Yamamura, finally, are well-known contemporary authors of popular fiction. Thus, this study could give a rough picture of connections between foreigner talk and how foreigners speak in Japanese fiction, and it could show if foreigner talk in Japanese fiction is relevant to study further at all.

Not only the language of the Western characters, but also the speech style of one Japanese character for each work, was studied. This was done for the sake of validity (checking that the studied features, when found, were really due to foreigner talk) and for studying if foreigners are addressed in a simplified way in Japanese fiction. Therefore, statistics are divided into sentences addressed to Westerners and into sentences addressed to other Japanese.

Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. First, the average sentence length of the characters was measured. Previous Japanese studies measuring sentence length have argued for the merits of counting the number of graphemes/sentence,²² but since I studied dialogue, I chose to count the number of mora. Studies of spoken language sometimes measure sentence length using utterances as a unit.²³ This unit was not considered appropriate when studying dialogue in written material, where the length of an utterance is hard to determine.²⁴ Thus, graphic sentences were measured instead.

The ratio of main verbs²⁵ per sentence containing verbs (excluding expressions functioning as copulas) was also counted for measuring syntactic simplicity. A sentence containing two verbs likely contains coordinate and/or subordinate clauses, and avoidance of complex sentences has been regarded as a feature of real Japanese foreigner talk. A low ratio of verbs does, however, not necessarily mean that the text is “simple.” Instead, this might be an indication of a high frequency of nominalizations – a characteristic of a rather formal style. Thus, the presentations of statistical results are followed by discussions on the reasons for the differences found between native and non-native speakers. Interactional features, as well as cases of redundancy, are taken into consideration, and example sentences are provided.

Furthermore, the frequencies of foreign words and markers of politeness are treated. These features have been reported also in previous studies.²⁶ Here, they are mainly studied for checking how they correlate to speech styles depicted as “simplified.” It will also be discussed whether these features are used by Japanese characters addressing Westerners or not.

Some works feature more than one Western character. In these cases, the sentences of the character uttering the largest number of sentences will be provided when presenting statistics.

Results

Sentence Length

In Fig. 1 (below), the average length of the sentences uttered by the characters is summarized. To begin with, one factor contributing to the relatively short sentences in the newer works is likely that the newer works are comics. There are, however, works featuring Westerners uttering shorter sentences than the Japanese characters. When studying this chart, however, it has to be taken into account why the sentences are shorter.

Fig. 1

Sentence lengths

In Tanizaki, one contributing factor is that the Western character is of minor importance to the story, while the native speaker addressed is the protagonist, making the dialogue featuring him more complicated both in contents and form. In Yamamura, as a contrast, the foreigner is the protagonist, the sentences uttered by and addressed to her being long. In Urasawa, many of the sentences consist of short exclamations and of broken sentences – contributing to a low number of mora. In Okamoto, the register used by the Japanese character (NS) when addressing the Westerner (NNS) was possible to compare to the register used when addressing a Japanese character with a similar function to the story.

• (1)

  NS:	Sono	nihonjin-wa	nan-to	ii-mas-u	ka.
  	that	Japanese-TOP	what-QUOT	say-POL-N.PAST	Q
  	“What’s the name of that Japanese?”
  NNS:	Shimada-san…	Nagasaki-no	hito	ari-mas-u.27
  	Shimada-san	Nagasaki-GEN	person	COP-POL-N.PAST
  	“Shimada… He is from Nagasaki.”
  NS:	Toshi-wa	ikutsu	des-u	ka.
  	year-TOP	how many years	COP.POL-N.PAST	Q
  	“How old is he?”
  NNS:	Toshi,	shiri-mas-en.	Waka-i	hito	des-u.	Nijuushichi…
  	year	know-POL-NEG	young-N.PAST	person	COP.POL-N.PAST	twenty-seven
  	“I don’t know. A young person. Twenty-seven…”28

In (1), the sentences uttered by the Westerner are short, and they only feature basic sentence patterns. The sentences uttered by the native speaker function as information requests and the topics generate short turns. This is an occasion where the register of the Japanese character might reflect a discourse feature of real-life foreigner talk – listener orientation – as this pattern is not this frequent when native speakers interact in this work. In the other works studied, however, this tendency was not found when Japanese interacted with Westerners. It is striking that Western characters with passive roles have been considered representative of Westerners in Japanese fiction – but the statistics in Fig. 1 do not say that Western characters should speak a truly “simplified” variety of Japanese.

Frequencies of Verbs

Fig. 2 shows the ratio of main verbs/graphic sentence containing verbs.

Fig. 2

Frequency of verbs

The works where the sentences of Westerners contain fewer verbs than those of Japanese characters are in many cases the same as the works where the sentences of the Westerners are short. The differences are, however, often small, and when significant (like in Tanizaki), the differences have other reasons, like the importance of the characters to the story.

But long sentences and a high ratio of verbs can be related to a portrayal of foreigner talk features, namely in the depiction of redundancy and clarification. It is hard to conclude, however, whether this feature, when found, is really due to a depiction of simplified/clarified speech or due to the style of the author. For further studies on this, the intuition of a native speaker is necessary. There are, however, works (Okamoto, Tanizaki, Unno and Urasawa) featuring more occasions of clarification when native speakers and non-natives interact than when native speakers talk to each other (this is a feature of Japanese addressing foreigners rather than a characteristic of how foreigners talk). Consider the following example:

• (2)

  Anata[Ø],	Shimada-to	i-u	hito-no	shashin[Ø],
  you [Ø]	Shimada-QUOT	call-N.PAST	person-GEN	photo[Ø]
  mot-te	i-masen	ka.
  own-GER	PROG-POL.NEG	Q
  “Do you have a photo of the person called Shimada?”29

Here, the Japanese character refers to a person well known to the Westerner being addressed. Still, the explanatory expression to iu (“who is called”) is used. Also the personal pronoun anata, when used more frequently in interaction between foreigners and Japanese than in interaction between native speakers (as in Okamoto and Urasawa), can be regarded as over-clarifying if understood from the context. This is, however, a tendency – in all of the works, there are examples of anata not being written out explicitly. Furthermore, other language features of clarification, such as confirmation checks³⁰ (like Do you understand?), were not more prominent in interactions with foreigners than in interactions between native speakers.

Furthermore, in Okamoto and Unno – the works featuring speakers of aru yo-language –iterations expressing stress/emphasis are frequent, as in (3).

• (3)

  Ik-e-mashen,31	ik-e-mashen.
  go-POT-POL.NEG	go-POT-POL.NEG
  “You can’t go, you can’t go.”32

This could reflect a limited vocabulary, as emphasis could be expressed using, for example, adverbs instead. This characteristic could be further studied treating more works featuring aru yo-language – as it has been noted that iterations are found frequently in simplified registers.³³

Foreign Words

It was reconfirmed (as noted by Yoda) that Westerners frequently use foreign words instead of their Japanese equivalents in fiction. There is a difference over time – foreign words are more frequently found in the newer works (Yamamura, Takahashi, Urasawa, Takeda & Koyama) than in the older ones. There is, however, only rarely a correlation between foreign words and speech styles depicted as simple. Instead, these expressions should rather be regarded as markers of foreignness. With exception of foreign expressions established in Japanese, most of these expressions are of a basic nature – like interjections (yes replacing hai) and honorary titles (miss replacing -san). This has been mentioned as a characteristic of primary foreigner talk too – Long, for example, provides an example of a native speaker using the English word walk instead of aruku ³⁴ – but in the fictional works, these expressions are used regardless of the language proficiency of the Westerner. Furthermore, there are occasions when it is marked that the characters speak English – for example by whole sentences written in English (in Urasawa,³⁵ 24 sentences are written in English). It can also be mentioned in the narrative that sentences are uttered in English (Tanizaki).

In Yamamura, Takahashi and Urasawa, foreign words are omnipresent also when Westerners are addressed by Japanese. In these cases, the expressions used are similar to those uttered by the Westerners themselves (greeting phrases and titles). They are, however, used also when the Western characters are depicted speaking fluent Japanese – thus, this was not concluded to be a conventionalized means for expressing accommodation to speakers with low language proficiency. At least in Takahashi, the foreign words might be due to the setting in a stereotypically “Western” environment. In Urasawa, however, there is a first encounter between a Westerner and a Japanese character where the Westerner is addressed as in (4):

• (4)

  Howai	yuu-ga	Japan-ni	ki-ta	no-wa	naze
  why	you-NOM	Japan-ALL	come-PAST	NML-TOP	why
  des-u	ka.
  COP.POL-N.PAST	Q
  “Why did you come to Japan?”36

Here, English words are used as a means of accommodation to the non-native speaker. This is, however, the only occasion featuring this speech style in the material.

Polite Speech Style

In Nagai, Okamoto, Unno and Takahashi, addressee honorifics were used almost consistently by the Western characters. Correlations between polite forms/addressee honorifics and a simplified speech style are, however, only rarely to be found. Furthermore, the characters use honorifics even when they speak their mother tongue and when thinking, and they know how to form the plain forms of verbs in, for example, subordinate clauses. Sometimes, it is also hard to conclude whether the high frequency of honorifics contributes to the impression of foreignness or if it is due to other factors, like the occupation of the character (the Western character in Takahashi, for example, using a polite speech style consistently, is portrayed as a waiter stereotype).

In three of the studied works, namely Nagai, Okamoto and Yamamura, there are Japanese characters using honorifics frequently when addressing Westerners. In Okamoto, other Japanese characters of the same social status as the Westerner (inferior and out-group) are addressed using plain forms, while the Westerner is consistently addressed using addressee honorifics. In Yamamura, the Western character, although being a close friend to the Japanese character,³⁷ is addressed using polite style. Here, however, the Westerner is depicted speaking rather fluent Japanese (in spite of using English words like yes and miss), and the utterances of the Japanese character are not depicted as simple at all - thus, the polite style cannot be regarded as a depiction of a simplified register in this work. This can be said also concerning Nagai.

Other Features

One feature found in several works (Unno, Yamamura, Takahashi, Urasawa, Takeda & Koyama), also reported as a characteristic of real foreigner talk,³⁸ is the phenomenon of compliment – native speakers praising the language proficiency of the Westerners. There are also works where the Japanese language of the non-native speaker is stated to be bad – either as a self-accusation uttered by the foreigners themselves (Tanizaki, Unno, Yamamura) or written in the narrative (Okamoto, Tanizaki). In Tanizaki, the actual utterances are neither depicted as simplified language nor characterized by other markers of Western nationality. This might be due to that substandard language in fiction tends to give a comical impression, as is noted by Yoda,³⁹ but it can also be due to the individual author’s opinions on how to portray dialogue.

An example of a highly simplified speech style used when addressing foreigners was also found, as illustrated below:

• (5)

  Antara-no,	ie…	sum-u	ie…	ne-ru	tokoro…
  you-GEN	house	live-N.PAST	house	sleep-N.PAST	place
  “Your house… the house where you live… the place where you sleep…”40

This speech style is characterized by short, broken sentences, redundancy (repetition using periphrasis) and the use of analytical constructions (sumu ie instead of sumai). Furthermore, gestures are used for clarification. Example (5) was, however, found in a conversation with another Asian character. Furthermore, example (4), where foreign words are used as a means of accommodation, is uttered in a first encounter with a non-native speaker. This gives ideas for further studying foreigner talk in Japanese fiction – to study the language used by and in interaction with characters explicitly speaking “bad” Japanese, and to study the language used in first encounters between characters.

Discussion

The results of this study are summarized in Table 3 and it is difficult to identify any particular trends.

Table 3 Summary of results (?= characteristic found but not necessarily due to a simplified register, but rather due to factors like the importance of the character)

Once again, the purpose of this study was not to establish characteristics of one particular register, but rather to study different registers from a foreigner talk perspective. It is, however, always marked linguistically that the characters are Westerners, but the way of depiction differs – in some works Westerners speak in a simplified way, but in other works, the speech style of Westerners just conveys an “exotic” flavour – foreignness. What characteristics of foreigner talk do then reoccur when foreigners speak in Japanese fiction?

At first, morphological differences to standard Japanese are rare. This is also the case in real life foreigner talk. Uzawa posits a reason for this – that Japanese would regard complex verb forms as single words, not necessary to simplify.⁴¹ Uzawa does not develop this point further, but the hypothesis could be further studied comparing properties of secondary foreigner talk in languages of different typological criteria (agglutinating, isolating, etc.).

On the other hand, there are works featuring Westerners speaking in a simple way – consistently uttering short sentences with a syntactically basic structure, as in example (1). The occurrence of this phenomenon is related to the importance of the characters to the story – the language of minor characters is generally depicted as “simpler” than that of the protagonists. If short sentences with simple structure should be regarded as indices of foreign nationality, this is in accordance with Kinsui’s notion that minor characters tend to use more stereotypical language for quicker conveying a picture of the character.⁴² This finding should, however, be regarded as a tendency, not as a rule, as all of the characters do know how to form syntactically complex clauses. This is also the case in works featuring Westerners speaking aru yo-language – although being a stereotypically depicted, possibly pidgin-related role language, as a system, it is not necessarily portrayed as simplified.

Polite style and foreign words, when found in fiction, are only rarely related to simplified language. These phenomena are found also in real life primary foreigner talk, but judging from this study, it cannot be concluded if their use is really due to a depiction of secondary foreigner talk – characters using polite forms and loan words rarely speak in a simplified way. Concerning the frequency of foreign words, it also appears possible that they have their origin in the first works of Japanese literature set in the West, as well as in early translations of Western literature. The use of foreign words in these works has been accounted for in several ways, including that they create an exotic atmosphere.⁴³ Whatever the reason, this way of depicting Westerners, both when they speak Japanese and when they speak Western languages, then got established as the norm, in the same way as Yoda proposes that the exclamatory Oo has become a marker of Westernness.⁴⁴ It could also be noted that foreign words are used also by protagonists of Western ethnicity – something that would appear contrary to Kinsui’s theories on when stereotypic language is used. Still, these protagonists do not serve as objects of identification to the reader (stereotypic language makes characters harder to identify with than if they speak “standard Japanese”).

Concerning the polite speech style, on the other hand, no explanations like those proposed above appear sufficient. For this material, it appears possible that the polite speech style is due to that the interaction often takes place in elegant environments – but it could be studied to what extent these environments are perceived as typically “Western” environments.

However, also when the language is portrayed as simplified, there are differences between the means of depicting the language of the Westerners. Thus, it was not concluded that there is one conventionalized means for marking the language of non-native speakers as simplified in a way reminiscent of known features of real life foreigner talk.

Is it, then, possible that the speech style of Westerners in fiction gets impact on how Japanese address foreigners in reality, in the way that Ferguson posited in English?⁴⁵ Such a theory would get support especially by similarities between the language in fiction and the study by Sokolik, as this study uses the same method as Ferguson. Such similarities are not found, however. Ferguson posits that children might learn how to use the speech styles of foreigners in fiction when playing in peer groups. While it might be the case that Japanese children do not “play” Westerners, it has to be further studied why the properties of fictional language do not seem to appear in Sokolik’s material.

In some works, there are utterances of Japanese characters addressing foreigners in a way sharing characteristics with foreigner talk. These characteristics are found when the language of the characters is depicted as (or claimed to be) “bad,” and in first encounters between characters. There are differences between this speech style and the results of studies on foreigner talk in reality, however, especially when compared to studies treating language students, where the native speakers know that the foreigners have a basic command of Japanese. It can also be noted that interactional features of foreigner talk (comprehension checks, typical patterns for turn-taking, etc.) are largely absent when foreigners are addressed in fiction. This might be due to factors like the opinion of the author on the depiction of dialogue – should dialogue in fiction be close to reality or only convey what is important for the story? It is also possible that linguistic stereotypes indicating situations become conventionalized in fiction in a way similar to that of stereotypes indicating personality types. A more general study on how dialogue in Japanese fiction relates to conversation in real-life would be of benefit for developing further on this point. Furthermore, the results of real life studies are not always relevant for studying stereotypes, as many studies of Japanese foreigner talk focus on conversation analysis, a field not focusing on stereotypes. More varied kinds of real life experiments have to are necessary also for further studying the language in fiction.