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Language nationalism? Kanji on the Internet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Nanette Gottlieb
Nanette Gottlieb*
Affiliation:
Department of Asian Languages and Studies, University of Queensland QLD 4072, AUSTRALIA
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Abstract

As of August 1998, the Japanese language was the second most widely used language other than English on the Internet. It has from time to time been argued that the way in which the Japanese view their language contributes to a kind of language nationalism which functions to emphasise the separateness of the Japanese people from others in the affective as well as linguistic sense. In an extension of this debate, some have suggested that the continued use of the Japanese writing system in the computer age acts to reinforce a barrier between Japan and the rest of the world. This paper examines the issues involved in the language nationalism view of the Japanese script and argues that the use of characters on the Internet should be seen as nothing more than the continuation of an existing infrastructure.

Type
Part II. Contemporary Perspectives
Information
South Pacific Journal of Psychology , Volume 10 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Asia-Pacific Language Research , 1999 , pp. 39 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © University of Papua New Guinea and the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Territory University, Australia 1999

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