Product Description

This book surveys the two main indigenous languages of Japan, Japanese and Ainu. No genetic relationship has been established between them, and structurally they differ significantly. Shibatani has therefore divided his study into two independent parts. The first is the most comprehensive study of the polysynthetic Ainu language yet to appear in English. The second part deals extensively with Japanese. It discusses topics from the evolution of the writing system and the differences between men's and women's speech, to issues of greater theoretical complexity, such as phonology, the lexicon and word formation, and the syntax of agglutinative morphology. As an American trained scholar in Japan, the author is in a unique position that affords him a dual perspective on language deriving from Western linguistic scholarship and the Japanese grammatical tradition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #749281 in Books
• Published on: 1990-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 428 pages

Review
"Shibatani's wide-ranging survey of Japanese is replete with intriguing ideas...it is a significant and timely contribution to the literature from a productive and influential scholar." Linguistic Anthropology

"This combination of breadth and boldness makes for instructive and engaging reading, all in an accessible style which promises to make this work a staple on reading lists in future courses on the history and structure of the Japanese language." Wesley M. Jacobsen, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Reference Book
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.

Necessary Reading to Correct False Views on Language
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.

Not what it claims to be!
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.