Sociolinguistic research on native speakers of English in Japan: Language variation and change caused by language and dialect contact

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This study investigated the consequences of frequent interaction abroad between native speakers of English (NSE) of different dialects and between NSE and non-NSE. It explores the long-term accommodation which takes places in the Anglophone community of Japan. For the purposes of this study, a real-time study was conducted to observe the modification of various vowels and consonants among NSE from England, the United States and New Zealand who were living in Japan. This study also considers individual speakers' social network strength. British networks, North American networks and Australasian networks of individual speakers were examined with the speaker' s choice of variants.The results have confirmed that there are changes in the choice of variants for some consonants and vowels after a year in Japan but the directions and the amount of the change depends on the speaker. Some strong correlations between the change in the choice of variants and the speaker's social network strength h … More ave been demonstrated as follows: (1) a strong social network with NSE from their home country area encourages the use of variants which are commonly used in their own English variety and/or hinders the use of variants more commonly used in other English varieties, (2) a strong social network with NSE from a country other than their own facilitates the use of variants which are more commonly used in the English variety of the other country and/or suppresses the use of the variants commonly used in their own English variety, and (3) a strong social network with non-NSE suppresses the use of variants which are not commonly used by the non-NSE. The present study of the influence of social networks on language use has demonstrated that the direction of dialect accommodation in a place where no target or dominant dialect exists is not simply determined by the place where the speaker lives, but rather determined, at least partly, by the people the speaker has close contact and frequent interactions with. Less