Summary

This project intends to explore the dynamics and the direction of linguistic variation and change observed in contemporary (post-WWII) Japanese through multiple innovative approaches, analyzing a wide range of phenomena from phonetics and lexicon to grammar and orthography. In doing so, it will also attempt to explore brand-new linguistic data (e.g., various kinds of corpora) using a set of innovative survey and analysis methods, promoting, for example, a synthesis of lexicology and sociolinguistics. Based on such solid data and methodology, the project aims at establishing a new applied field in linguistics for dealing with actual language problems, and a firm research foundation for observation and analysis from multiple viewpoints of the ever-changing contemporary Japanese language.