재일제주인의 언어 변화와 언어 전환 과정 연구

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to comprehend how the language of the Jeju immigrant society in Japan, an ethnic minority, changed with the simultaneous use of the Jeju dialect and Japanese. It particularly examined how those Jeju people residing in Osaka, Japan, retained the Jeju dialect in their community, mixed it with Japanese as bilingual speakers, and experienced language shift to the mainstream Japanese, over multiple generations. The research gave an overall insight into what changes the language of an immigrant society could undergo with language contact. Chapter 2 discussed the notion and phenomena of language contact, the theory that the study was based on. Examples of language contact were focused on those theories that can explain the linguistic features shown in the process of language shift of the immigrants to that of the country they immigrated to. In the review of language usage, Chapter 2 introduced the aspect where those immigrants in the first generation were mostly fluent in the Jeju dialect while those others in the third generation were generally incapable of speaking it. It also showed that the Jeju people turned out to find it unnecessary to speak the Jeju dialect. Chapter 3 displayed how the immigrants in Japan retained the Jeju dialect. A phonological analysis revealed that they still use 'ㆍ(arae a)', which is one of the vowels spoken only by the group of elderly locals in Jeju Province. It also showed that there still exists palatalization and phonemic addition in the immigrant society. In terms of grammar, the features of the Jeju dialect remained unchanged in such cases as using different forms of adessive postpositions depending on the final consonant of the preceding noun or selecting appropriate final endings according to the hearer-honorific system. Furthermore Chapter 3 introduced examples of the changes that the Jeju dialect experienced in the immigrant society. It especially explained that the linguistic change made by the immigrant speakers was more apparent in the replacement of lexicons or grammatical morphemes of the Jeju dialect with those of Japanese than in the phonological or morphological replacements. However the speakers retained grammatical restrictions even when using both the languages in one sentence by replacing some elements of the sentence in the Jeju dialect with those others in Japanese. Chapter 4 discussed the mixed use of the two languages as well as the use of colloquial Jeju dialect by different generations. The Jeju dialect speakers in Japan first borrowed Japanese words and then began mixing the two languages. Code mixing, a strategy of bilingual speakers, takes place because they select either language depending on speech situations or listeners. However it also occurs when they fail to set clear boundaries between the two languages. In particular code mixing without clear linguistic boundaries can be a result of their imperfect linguistic ability and language intereference between the two languages with similar grammatical structures. The first generation Jeju immigrants in Japan are bilingual speakers that use both the Jeju dialect and Japanese, but at the same time, they use mixed languages as they failed to distinguish them clearly. In addition the similarities in the languages led to the language interference. Their personal unique pattern of language usage were eventually disseminated throughout the community, developing a new language system. A frequent mixing of '-허다(heoda)' and '-する(suru)', both of which mean 'to do something' in the Jeju dialect and in Japanese, respectively, is due to the application of grammatical phonemes serving a certain function in either of the two languages to those with the same function in the other language in conversation. The second or later generations of the Jeju people residing in Japan have seen most of their colloquial language shifted to that of Japanese. It was also significant that even the first generation with a prolonged residence in Japan also underwent a colloquial language shift. In terms of usage, Japanese was confirmed to be superior to the Jeju dialect among the first generation immigrants although they spoke in the Jeju dialect with their spouses at home or with their friends and neighbors from Jeju. It was especially significant that the absolute majority of those of the second or later generations used Japanese. The study also found that language shift of the Jeju people took place at a faster pace than that of the other Korean immigrant societies in Japan. In general, the first generation of immigrants become bilinguals that put superiority on their mother tongue than the language of the country they immigrated to, while the second and third generations become fluent in both the languages at a similar level. The immigrants eventually use only the mainstream language in later generations, which is the final stage of language shift. On the other hand, the bilingual period of the Jeju immigrants in Japan last relatively shorter than that of other immigrants. That is, the second and third generations, not their descendents, experienced the last stage of language shift, becoming speakers who use only the mainstream language, Japanese. As an ethnic minority surrounded by the Japanese locals within the national boundaries, it must be very difficult for Korean Japanese to adhere to their own native language, not to mention those who speak regional dialects such as the Jeju dialect. In order to have access to formal education or job opportunities in Japan, it is essential to be a Japanese speaker. The Jeju dialect was not inherited by younger generations in the Jeju immigrant society because the parents had high hopes that their children would be more fluent in Japanese than in their mother tongue so as not to be discriminated in the Japanese society. Attending Japanese schools and having no education regarding their native language affected language shift in younger generations. The said impact becomes even more powerful generation after generation, and eventually, they do not even have to bother themselves any more by selecting one language depending on the situations. Those born in Japan naturally consider Japanese as their native language while accepting the Jeju dialect as a foreign language which they selectively acquire through learning. Language shift found in the Jeju immigrant society in Japan has the same meaning that its members do not retain their native language any longer. In other words it is now being transformed into a Japanese monolingual society from a bilingual society of the Jeju dialect and Japanese.