SHORT REFLECTIVE ARTICLESWhat should we do to protect ourlanguage identities?
The impact of society, beliefs, and the education system
Maria Yamazaki

About the author

Introduction

I was born in Japan as a child of Brazilian
parents, coincidentally in the year that had afootball world cup in Japan/Korea when
Brazil became world champion. Ⅰ speak
Japanese, Portuguese, and English and I’m a
student at Chuo University studying law andinternational politics. My area of interests inresearch is about protecting minority rights soin my first year I researched thediscrimination against LGBT persons andfocused on “gay marriage” in Japan. From
my own experiences as a multilingual person
who grew up in Japan, in my second-year
seminar, I wanted to research about language
issues, specifically the protection of language
identities. That is the focus of this academicblog.

Language identity is a type of
personal identity that is createdfrom our language history and thisis a very important part of our lives.
For me, the question of language
identity had a great effect in thecreation of my own identity, andthat process made me who I amright now. Even though I didn't
know what language identity
meant exactly at the time, it played
an important role in my life.
As a person who grew up in asociety which doesn't use mymother tongue, I had many
struggles in terms of using anotherlanguage. The elementary and junior high schools I went to in Gunma didn’t havegood programs to help children with more than one language to use two
languages. The school system of separating students who didn’t have Japanese as
their first language made me have a feeling of exclusion. And from the age of 10 or
so, I started to think it was embarrassing to use Portuguese in front of Japanesepeople. I also tried hard to be “Japanese” so I could be the same as everyone. This
need to be monolingual and monocultural stopped me from being proud of myself:
Without knowing, I was excluding myself from speaking a different language fora long time.
All this had a big impact on my sense of identity and raised many personal andcomplex questions for me. In this academic blog I want to focus on my personal

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LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(2)language experiences in relation to social systems and beliefs to do withnationalism. I also share the experiences of another young person who, like me,went to school in Japan, but whose school environment was quite different frommine. What follows is based on my autumn research project in my second-year
seminar on Language Issues in Society.
When I first started going more deeply into these experiences, I started to
become interested in the connection of identity and multilingualism. Earlier in 2022,
I had researched about issues in multilingual countries. I had expected that, when
the society is multilingual, there should be several mixes of language identities forpeople who use more than one language. In addition, as a politics major, therelationship between language identity and nationalism had a big appeal for me.
How do beliefs and ideas about nationalism affect language users’ identities? Is
there a simple national identity for people like me who are multilingual? Thosequestions were really important for me in understanding language identity, so
nationalism is one of the essential themes in this academic blog post.
I have had a struggle with my own personal and national identity since I was ayoung child. I have often asked myself: “Am I Japanese/Brazilian or
Brazilian/Japanese?” According to my own experiences, does it mean thatsomehow, the society, and the situation around a person can harm a person’s
language identities? I have come to understand that there are several factors which
may have the potential to build a wall and limit our language identities.

What is language identity?
We cannot underestimate the importance of language identity. According to myresearch, I found that it is a type of identity that is created based on language. I
also learnt that language is not only an individual question. It has a strong
connection with society, the feelings and attitudes of people around you, andcultural norms.
Stan Grant, an Australian journalist who writes and talks about indigenous issues
and his Aboriginal identity, has commented, “Languages and names are markers ofidentity.”1 According to Grant, language identity is not just a simple factor, but itshows who we are and where we are. For me, language identity is one of the most

1

Grant (2016)

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SHORT REFLECTIVE ARTICLES

important parts of my own identity. My first language is Portuguese, and then I
learned Japanese when I was 3-5 years old, so I grew up with two languages fromwhen I was very little.
Understanding the significance of those two languages was a challenge for me.
We use language to speak, think, communicate, express our thoughts, ideas, andopinions ... and to show ourselves to others. When you want to do something, thefirst thing you do is probably to think, and language and thought are deeply
connected with each other. So, most of the time, language is an important factor in
our daily lives. We can also say that our social life depends on our language use
and the communities we interact with. Basically, our daily lives are dominated byour language use. But in what ways were my language choices restricted or not?
Let’s think together about language choices, and language hierarchy in society.

Language choice and the impact of social systems
To put it simply, language choice is the choice about what language one will use,
but it is not a free choice that individuals make. Language choice can shiftdepending on both individual and societal factors.

Societal restrictions on language choice
According to my research, language choice is both individual and societal. In
sociolinguistics, when people mention the word “language choices”, they are talking
about individual speakers’ decision-making within a language (Aoyama & Denton,2020) — the choices that a person makes to use one language or another.
However, societies also restrict language choices that people can make. As you cansee in the figure below, language choice means not only the language which will be
spoken but also the languages that will have official support, and which are taught
in the education system. Society restricts language choice in this way, for example:• What/How many languages will be used in this society & when they will be
used?
• How many different languages are included in a language education
system?
• How many different languages are recognized and included in a public
spaces/places and information way in a society? … etc.

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LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(2)This figure2

global languages

shows the hierarchy
between languages

national/regional
languages

in terms of language
choice which helped

dialects/creoles/pidgins

us understand how
language choices

idiolects/sociolects/
ethnolects

are created insociety.
What stands at

the top of the hierarchy is global languages, which today is primarily known as
English. According to my research, there is no official definition of global language,
but it refers to language that is learned and spoken internationally. Also, global
language is defined by its usefulness on a global scale for economic and trade
purposes (Tyers, 2016). The second level is national and regional languages, which
can include the main languages of the society (for example, Japanese in Japan,
Portuguese in Brazil, or Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia). The third level is dialects(for example, Osaka-ben, or Yamaguchi-ben), creoles and pidgins, and the bottom
level is idiolects, sociolects, ethnolects which includes various kinds of languages
that individuals or small groups and communities use. In Japan, nearly everybody
speaks Japanese, and young people rarely have a choice about the first foreign
language that they learn. It is English. So, people’s basic language choices are
restricted unless they have interest in learning another language or they use
some different languages in their family.

Individual restrictions on language choice
For an individual person, the meaning of language choice is simpler. Each person
can have multiple language identities depending on language choices and uses.
However, this flexibility depends on your society’s language hierarchy, which
affects the choices that you can make. Sometimes the restrictions in a society can
prevent you from freely making individual language choices. In my case, I started
with Portuguese at home, then through playing with children at kindergarten I

2Tyers (2016)

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SHORT REFLECTIVE ARTICLES

began to use Japanese, and later I began to learn English at school. Although there
was a Portuguese class at school, I did not take it because it was Portuguese only
and the children in that class did not interact in Japanese with Japanese speakers.
The children in the class were isolated within the school community, and myparents wanted me to be bilingual. The school’s language policies, my parents’wishes, and my future social prospects acted to restrict and support my language
choices.
Strangely enough as I grew up in a monocultural society in Gunma, I still could
live with two totally different cultures. However, even for me, accepting the use ofanother language became difficult as I went through the school system and learnt
that monolingualism is expected. It became so normal for me to speak only
Japanese, that I thought it was weird to use a different language. As a teenager I
wanted to use only Japanese, and I insisted on this to my parents a lot. On myparents’ side, they didn’t want me to use Japanese at home because they were
hoping for me not to forget and lose Portuguese. I respected their wishes andmanaged to use only Portuguese at home, but it was still really annoying at thetime!

Having an international education in Japan, Tokyo
While doing my research, I started to be interested in the story of a student who
had to come through a situation similar to me. She spoke different languages athome and school like me, but with a totally different school system unlike mine. She
is a high school student in Tokyo, but she has studied only at international schools.
Her name is AH (pseudonym). She was born in Japan to Japanese parents.
However, from kindergarten, at a very young age, she grew up surrounded by
English. She has been to 3 different international schools in Tokyo, and when I
interviewed her, she was 16 years old, a freshman at an international high school. In
the school which she is going to now, teachers and students use Japanesefrequently compared to other international schools, but the previous two schools
were mainly in English, so she spent her recent school life mostly using English. At
home she used Japanese and then at school she had education and interaction in
English with other students.
“There were many times when I asked myself which language is my mothertongue; Japanese or English?”27

LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(2)This is what AH said about her own language identity. Studying wasn’t the badpart because she loved learning languages, but the high amount of study, thepressure, and the other kids calling her “ガリ勉” (= gariben, which means nerd inJapanese) were a hard part of using two languages for her. Sometimes It made her
feel uncomfortable learning English, but she said she is grateful now for having
studied English.
“I think I am very lucky to have the opportunity to say my opinion in English.
There are some opinions that can be expressed in English that cannot be felt inJapanese, and there are somethings about language that can be spoken only
because I studied English.”
AH’s story was very impactful for me. She had an opportunity to be bilingual
even though she was living in a monolingual society; in clear contrast to me, she
could become bilingual because she spoke Japanese at home but not at school.
Since she interacts with people in her age in English, at the time she was more
comfortable using English than Japanese, which is her mother tongue. It’s funnythat the “language shock” we faced was the same even though we went to schools
with completely different systems; while mine was a rural and conservative school,hers was a metropolitan “international” school. Even when we are trying to make achoice for ourselves, social restrictions (at this point coming from the schools)
and people around us (parents’ decision in a young age, other students who weinteracted with, and teachers) can cause a huge impact on our language
identities as individuals.

Strong beliefs and exclusion
Nationalism, patriotism and language identities
As I mentioned, sometimes the idea of monolingualism can create a feeling of
exclusion about using another language. It makes people think that their language
has the priority, which I associate with the sense of strong mono-nationalism. So,
what would be the connection between nationalism and language identity?
Language is the most important way to create a sense of group identity. From myresearch I concluded that language, politics, and culture are not separated, but they
are all mixed together and they occupy an important part in our lives. One of thewell-known beliefs which occupies an important role in language, politics, andcultures is nationalism.

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SHORT REFLECTIVE ARTICLESNationalism is often used to bring people together and to have a common
national identity. However, it can also be exploited to create separation anddifference between people. One example is with language. It is not rare to see
people discouraging other language speakers to use only their language in theircountry; in Japan people say, “If you live in Japan, you MUST use Japanese” or, “Whywould I have to learn another language since I will live only in Japan for the rest of
my life?”.
In fact, what I saw in my life was not only the exclusion by society as I mentioned
before, but also by the people around me. When I used a different language, I felt
several “EYES” looking at me. Thinking about this now, those people around me
might simply have been amazed that I was using different languages, but for me asa child, those creepy “looks” I had to face when I was speaking Portuguese, mademe feel insecure about using it. Even though I had been using Japanese five seconds
before, in the time I used Portuguese, suddenly, I was being positioned as an
outsider.
In my opinion, believing strongly in nationalism can limit and be detrimental for
people's identities. This belief may make people have a strong sense of mononationalism and even a hatred for speakers of other languages. I have come torecognize that people’s beliefs sometimes play a bigger role in the creation of
language identities than other social factors.

Conclusion
To sum up, there are several factors which can prevent us from developing ourmultilingual language identities: the language choice in society, its system, thebeliefs of the people around us… and so on. How our language identity will becreated depends on our society and the people around us. If the society, and thesituation around a person can harm a person’s language identity, yes, it can have an
impact at some point. If someone or something stands in your way one time, it will
be difficult for you to try again and overcome it. Just once, if you lose being proud of
your language, you will be scared and try to eliminate your identity. If you stay inthe same situation, it will be very hard to escape from there. The same thing
happened to me, and the only way to escape from that kind of mindset was to put

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LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(2)myself into a different environment by going to university in a metropolitan area
where people are much less judgmental than in my hometown in Gunma.
Language identity occupies a very important part of our lives. It is yourself, yoursociety, your culture, and your people. To respect everyone’s language identities,
there is one thing that we have to protect: freedom of choice. Accepting language
diversity affects the way of language identities that we have. We have a right tochoose what languages we want to use and what languages we want to learn
without being disturbed by our society, and the situation around us. Social systems
and ideologies should not have to threaten this. If we show our respect to our
choices, there will be fewer problems to create our language identities.
At the end of this blog, I hope you have understood more about language
identities than when you started reading this. The most important thing that I want
to show is to respect yourself and your language choices, so that you can protect
your language identities in different stages of your life.

References
Aoyama, R. & Denton, L. (2021, April 1). Language choice of Japanese high school
students in intra-national communication critical reflection on language use andusers in Japan. KATE Journal.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/katejournal/34/0/34_73/_article
Brown, A. (2014, November 10). The power of language-nationalism/patriotism.
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzCs8MHR7XE
Grant, S. (2016, August 30). If language tells us who we are, then who am I? | stan grant.
The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/commentisfree/2016/aug/31/if-languagetells-us-who-we-are-then-who-am-i
Ichijo, A. (2016). The origin of nationalism: A review and annotated bibliography. The
State of Nationalism. http://stateofnationalism.eu/articles/the-origin-ofnationalism-a-review-and-annotated-bibliography/
Stone, E. (2020, July 5). Nationalism and language. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=rc1QhHxyRcI&amp;feature=youtu.be
Tyers, D. (2016). Language and identity. Advance Consulting for Education. https://aceducation.ca/pd_videos/language-and-identity/
Tyers, D. (2016). Language and multilingual societies. Advance Consulting for Education.
https://aceducation.ca/pd_videos/language-and-multilingual-societies/30