"Freestyle Linguistics"
Writer Profile
Shigeto Kawahara
Research Centers and Institutes Professor, The Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic StudiesShigeto Kawahara
Research Centers and Institutes Professor, The Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies
2022/09/13
Academic disciplines have their own "etiquette." To understand arithmetic, elementary school students must learn the definition of addition, and to major in psychology, university students must learn experimental methods and statistics. The same is true for linguistics, but when I was a university student myself, I felt a sense of unease at being told point-blank, "Linguistics has these analytical conventions, so master them first." I couldn't shake the question, "Is that analytical method really correct?" Therefore, when I teach, I concentrate on conveying the appeal of linguistics through familiar experiences, keeping the analytical conventions hidden in the background.
In this book, too, I have tried to tell most of the stories starting from my own experiences. When I visited my wife's family home to give my marriage greetings, I relieved my tension by being enchanted by her parents' nasalized 'g' sounds (bidakuon), thinking, "What lovely nasalized g-sounds." An episode titled "Behind the Scenes of Going Viral," where I gained inspiration when a maid threw a napkin at me while I was researching maid names. "Shigeto Kawahara, the Straw Millionaire," where that research on maid names unexpectedly led to a collaboration with a professional rapper. "Who are you?", the back story of my meeting with Yoichi Kitayama, which was a surprise even to me. "The Problem of Ambiguous Japanese," where I talk about the ambiguity of language based on the memory of a misunderstanding when I mistook my daughter's comment "moeshinu" (burning to death) for "moeshinu" (dying of cuteness).
I also dealt with issues touched upon in my past works, such as a project targeting ALS patients to save their voices and a project to translate misinformation about the new coronavirus into multiple languages. However, in this book, I wrote from a very personal perspective about what thoughts I had while being involved in them, what I felt, and what I learned. Before I knew it, a book was completed that analyzed all sorts of things using the analytical conventions of linguistics as a weapon. Precure, maids, Pokémon, Japanese rap, child-rearing—anything goes. Since we live our lives using language every day, it was only natural that it became "anything goes." Through the writing of this book, I was able to reaffirm that using the etiquette of linguistics brings the precision of human language to light. I might have been saying to my university-age self, "The etiquette you are learning now is this useful."
*Affiliations, job titles, etc., are as of the time of publication.