Freestyle Linguistics

Academic disciplines have their own "etiquette." For an elementary school student to understand arithmetic, they must learn the definition of addition; for a college student majoring in psychology, they must learn experimental methods and statistics. The same is true for linguistics. However, when I was a university student, I felt a sense of unease when I was told point-blank, "Linguistics has these analytical protocols, so master them first." I couldn't shake the question, "Is that analytical method really correct?" Therefore, when I teach, I focus on conveying the charm of linguistics through familiar experiences, keeping the analytical protocols hidden in the background.

In this book as well, I have told most of the stories starting from my own experiences. There is the time I visited my wife's parents' home to ask for their blessing for our marriage, where I eased my nerves by being captivated by their nasalized 'g' sounds: "What lovely bidakuon you have." There is the episode "Behind the Buzz," where I gained inspiration after a maid threw a napkin at me while I was researching maid names. There is "Shigeto Kawahara, the Straw Millionaire," about how that research on maid names unexpectedly led to a collaboration with a professional rapper. There is the back story of my meeting with Yoichi Kitayama, which was a surprise even to me: "Who on earth are you?" And "The Problem of Ambiguous Japanese," where I discuss the ambiguity of language based on a memory of a misunderstanding with my daughter, where I mistook her saying "moeshinu" (burning to death) for "moeshinu" (dying of cuteness/infatuation).

I also covered issues mentioned in my previous works, such as a project to save the voices of ALS patients and a project to translate misinformation about COVID-19 into multiple languages. However, in this book, I wrote about my thoughts on being involved in them, what I felt, and what I learned from a very personal perspective. Before I knew it, I had completed a book that analyzes all sorts of things using the analytical protocols of linguistics as a weapon. Precure, maids, Pokémon, Japanese rap, parenting—anything goes. Since we live our lives using language every day, it was only natural that it became an "anything goes" situation. Through writing this book, I was able to reaffirm that using the etiquette of linguistics brings the precision of human language to light. Perhaps I was speaking to my university-aged self, saying, "The protocols you are learning now are actually this useful."

Freestyle Linguistics

Shigeto Kawahara

Daiwa Shobo

352 pages, 1,980 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.