Japanese-English Code-Switching by Postwar Speakers in Contemporary America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her examination of Japanese-English bilingualism in Toronto, Nishimura (1995b) demonstrated that second-generation Japanese-Canadians varied their speech dependent on the audience they were addressing. According to her, the Japanese-Canadians spoke primarily in English to fellow second-generation speakers, while maintaining conversations in Japanese with those who had spent their formative years in Japan. However, when addressing audiences composed of both groups, they switched back and forth evenly between the two languages.\nFollowing research done by Woolard (1989) on the effects of societal influences on language, the state of the Japanese-Canadians can be related to the breakup of the ethnic enclaves in which they had lived prior to the onset of World War II, also described by Nishimura (1995a). In contrast, this study examines the language used by more recently arrived Japanese-American speakers, whose families had not undergone the political instability of earlier generations. Three groups of these postwar Japanese-English speakers, each consisting of one native speaker and two Japanese-American heritage speakers, provided the data for the study via conversations that were recorded during an internet call. These speakers came from a variety of educational backgrounds, and often spent at least some time in both Japan and the U.S.\nFollowing Myers-Scotton (1993), this study claims the diversity of parts of speech being used inside of one clause is a reliable metric that can be used in order to categorize a bilingual's speech. Using this method, the study finds that all of Nishimura's forms of bilingual speech are still being used among contemporary Japanese-Americans: a mostly Japanese version, a mostly English version, and a version in which the two languages are more evenly combined. The first two variants consist of the primary language with the occasional use of mostly single words from the other language, while the third contains a greater variety of grammatical items from both languages, and even grammatical overlaps that are not easily explainable in either language. Lastly, unlike the second-generation Japanese-Canadians from pre-war Japanese ethnic neighborhoods, who switched equally between Japanese and English when speaking to native speakers and fellow Japanese Canadians, the postwar second-generation Japanese-Americans in this study use primarily English in the same contexts. This occurs in spite of a consistently high opinion concerning the use of Japanese as held by the postwar speakers. Although the existence of the three variants of bilingual speech is confirmed among postwar Japanese-Americans, the choice of which variant to use is not dependent on the generation the speaker belongs to, but more concretely on the extent to which the speakers themselves were educated in Japan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".