“An Investigation of Osaka Jeju Islanders' Knowledge of Jejueo”
Sebastian Ohara-Saft (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa)
This talk has two parts, both drawing from a project that began in Osaka, Japan in the summer of 2022 with the same target population: elderly Koreans living in Japan who have roots in Jeju Island, South Korea. The first part of the talk describes a vocabulary production task using picture elicitation done in 2022 with eight elderly Jeju Islanders living in Osaka, Japan. The second part of the talk describes two additional tasks we have developed and aim to use this summer with the same participants from last year. The central research questions driving this project were the following: (1) What is the Jejueo knowledge of these elderly speakers in Osaka, Japan, and (2) How does their knowledge compare with adults who have only ever lived in Jeju? The talk aims to provide preliminary answers to these questions. Keywords: Jejueo, Osaka, language attrition, language contact, Zainichi
