We-code Honorifics in Southern Amami Ōshima (Tsutsui Billins) | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-11-24

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.

SOAS Linguistics webinars
We-code honorifics in Southern Amami Ōshima
24 November 2021

Martha Tsutsui Billins (SOAS University of London)

Abstract: This talk presents findings on honorifics in Southern Amami Ōshima, an endangered Ryukyuan language. Through fieldwork, this project explored bilingual Amami speakers’ language choices for expressing politeness in light of limited Amami honorific forms by collecting data from speakers in a range of different communicative events where honorifics would be expected. While Amami is no longer the unmarked code for politeness and deference, community members, including token speakers, still use Amami honorifics in day-to-day communication. Findings demonstrate that Amami speakers today draw on honorifics most commonly in the form of lexical touchstones, which they use as part of a we-code to index familiarity, intimacy, and localness. In this talk, I will focus on the functions and indexes of remaining Amami honorifics in the endangered language situation to which Amami belongs.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5725769