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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-second issue:

“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.

PROLOGUE

Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.

Although you could hardly guess it now, there was a time not very long ago when Japanese could not communicate so easily with each other, and in some cases not at all. Go back only a couple of hundred years, say—or maybe not much more than a century and a half or so—and we see in Japan a spread-out, Balkanized country, separated into groups of localized communities almost completely out of touch with each other. Most people living in the islands then had never met, much less talked to each other. In other words, Edo Japan was strikingly different from that hypermodern, interconnected place at the forefront of technological development we’re used to seeing today. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan was a backwater, left behind in the changing world events of that formative period.

Western forces besieged the country, just as they did other vulnerable Asian nations in the nineteenth century. But while its neighbors remained internally fragmented, militarily and economically weak, taken advantage of and colonized by outside powers, Japan changed rapidly to become a member of the first world order, an economic and military equal of America, Germany, France, Russia, and Britain. Unlike other non-Western nations, Japan drew its people together and met threats with strength. No other country in the world was able to accomplish that. How did Japan manage to transform itself in such a short period of time?

One factor in Japan’s modernization that isn’t usually given enough credit for what happened is the extent to which the country reshaped its language. Without unifying and adapting its language to serve the country’s modernization efforts, Japan could never have accomplished what it did. It was essential.

But those changes did not happen by themselves. Nor were they inevitable. The stories of what the Japanese did about their language and what happened as a result are what we want to take a look at here.

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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/

Selected readings

• "The many varieties of Japanese regional speech" (3/24/20)
• "Dialectology of Japanese reflexive exclamations" (1/8/17)
• "An Eighteenth-Century Japanese Language Reformer" (4/23/15)
• "Intelligibility and the language / dialect problem" (10/11/14)
• "Japanese dialects" (Wikipedia)
• "Stigmatization of dialects" (9/25/17)
• "Royal language" (9/25/15)
• "Writing from the Age of the Gods" (5/26/21)
• "The Ramsey hypothesis" (6/27/22)

December 30, 2025 @ 10:33 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Language and society, Language reform

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