第十六回「国際都市言語学会」（ULS16）年次大会

　This web page was published on April 13, 2018.
　Unauthorized copying and replication of the contents of this site, text and images are strictly prohibited. All Rights Reserved.

〇招待講演者　講演要旨

Prof. Dr. Florian Coulmas
Biography: Florian Coulmas is Senior Professor for Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics, Institute of East Asian Studies and Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Duisburg-Essen. From 2004 to 2015, he was director of the German Institute of Japanese Studies Tokyo. He held teaching and research positions at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Chuo University, Tokyo, the National Language Research Institute, Tokyo (currently Natonal Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics NINJAL), and was fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin. His recent publications include Writing and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Guardians of Language. Twenty voices through history, Oxford University Press, 2016; and An Introduction to Multilingualism. Language in a changing world, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Title: Economic Theory and the Diffusion of Languages
Abstract: Since Adam Smith, economists have taken an interest in various aspects of language. Reviewing some of the resulting models, this paper addresses the question of whether economic theories can explain the diffusion of languages. To this end, it looks at various areas where in the course of the past half century or language has become an object of economic interest. Particularly topical are political economy, decolonization and migration, development, globalization and trade, commodification, human capital, and languages as means of exchange. In connection with the last point it discusses the question whether economic concepts such as ‘value’, ‘network effects’ and ‘externality’ can have a more than metaphorical meaning when applied to language.

Prof. Dr. Paul Kerswill
Biography: Paul Kerswill is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. He has previously held posts at Cambridge, Reading and Lancaster universities. His research is largely focused on dialect contact, beginning with his doctoral study of Norwegian rural dialect speakers who had migrated to the city of Bergen. His later projects include a study of the British New Town of Milton Keynes, as well as an investigation of so-called Multicultural London English – a new youth variety spoken by a range of ethnic groups in the inner city. He is currently developing interests in language and social class, as well as sociolinguistic issues in West Africa. He was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017.
Title: On the origins of urban dialects: economic change and demography in nineteenth-century Britain
Abstract: The world is currently seeing massive migration and urbanisation in two major regions, China and Sub-Saharan Africa, where there are large-scale changes in urban languages and dialects. One of the best theorised sociolinguistic approaches to dialect change is new-dialect formation, or koineisation, seen, for example, in the English of New Zealand and the British New Town of Milton Keynes. In my lecture, I will go back to the origins of the modern economic order, the type of early capitalism that manifested itself during Britain’s Industrial Revolution from around 1760–1860. During this period, there was unprecedented urbanisation across the north of England, with the development of a host of urban industrial centres such as Manchester, Bradford and Leeds. However, the linguistic evidence for language change is confined to written texts, ranging from official documents to personal letters. Despite the success of the historical sociolinguistics movement, we have no means whatever to get at the actual speech language of the string of local communities that existed: we would have to wait until the advent of both modern sampling methods and modern sound recording to achieve this. My approach is, instead, sociodemographic, taking into account population movements, as revealed in the 1801 and later National Censuses. I ask the question: is there evidence of new-dialect formation in the nineteenth century? In my argument, I rely particularly on Mufwene’s Founder Effect and Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology. I argue that, for an existing dialect to be fundamentally changed or even replaced, there must have been a prolonged period during which at least 50% of the population was not local, a condition which is very stringent. A completely new dialect seems only to have appeared in the town of Middlesbrough, which was built on a virtually unpopulated site from 1830 on. All in all, even without any linguistic evidence, it is possible to conclude that the great northern cities and towns of Victorian England are the result of local dialect levelling processes, not new-dialect formation. I suggest that this procedure will be invaluable in modelling dialect change in the contemporary world.

Prof. Dr. Fumio Inoue
Biography;
　Born in May 17, 1942 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan.
　1966 Graduated from Faculty of Letters, Tokyo University.
　1968 Master of Arts, Graduate course of linguistics, Tokyo University.
　1971 Got enough units for a condidate to doctor's degree
　1971 to 1974 Assistant of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, Tokyo University
　1974 to 1977 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Letters, Hokkaido University
　1977 to 1986 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
　1986 to 2005 Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
　2005 to 2013 Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Meikai University
　Presently Professor Emeritus, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies & Meikai University
　Major in Sociolinguistics, Dialectology, Economy of language, Statistical Dialectology
　Awarded "Kindaichi Kyosuke Prize" in 1986 for the study of "new dialect".
Title: Language and Economy --- The countryside within urban areas ---（言語と経済 都会の中の田舎）
Abstract: Interest in (foreign) languages was once primarily influenced by religion and war, but after the 20th century it is more dominated by the economy. Economic development is reflected in the linguistic landscape. For example, in the case of Japanese, mutual influences between Japanese and foreign languages are reflected both in loanwords in Japan and “lendwords” in foreign countries, used on the street. Looking at the level of the world map, the following three phenomena show coincidence: easily observable linguistic landscape, reliable international public opinion polls and Google search. This is a triangulation which has only recently become possible. These phenomena allow a new kind of “linguistic geography” and “econolinguistics”, and are most conspicuously observable in three areas of marked economic development, North America, Europe and East Asia.
　　　Looking at the opposite direction of economic development, endangered languages are distributed unequally globally, and they correspond to three areas of economic delay (developing countries), South America, Africa and South Asia. Economic principles are at work on the endangered languages, that is, economic development brings about regional disparities in income, causing migration of population in the form of urbanization. In this process, common language spreads, and dialects and minority languages recede, with the younger generation largely failing to acquire the heritage language. However, there is hope. Some of the people who migrated to the city are bilingual (or bidialectal) and remember the language (or dialect) of their hometown. In these lucky cases, language surveys are possible without going to the site. This relies on technique which utilizes “memory time” (recall method). The urban language scene has hidden diversity and must be examined from new perspectives.