Summary

It is said that a large number of dialects exist in Japan. Most dialectological studies have focused primarily on the local dialects which developed historically in traditional social settings. On the other hand, there are other types of communities, such as urban centers (e.g. Osaka, Tokyo, etc.), new towns, and pioneer communities (e.g. Hokkaido), which have received immigrants with a number of different dialectal backgrounds. In these types of communities, intriguing (socio-)linguistic phenomena have been observed. The linguistic variation in these communities is different from that in old communities. The purpose of contact dialectology is to pay careful attention to these phenomena.

It is possible, at the same time, to categorize the linguistic phenomena in various ways. This project emphasizes the social structure of the societies (such as urban communities or agriculture-based communities) in the categorization. Sociolinguistic typology looks for relationships between the linguistic phenomena and the social structure of the communities. It is said that, generally speaking, a high-contact situation leads to simpler language structure, while a low-contact situation leads to more complicated structure. The primary goal of this project is to develop more universal approaches to sociolinguistic variation.