Yuri
I grew up in a small town in Hokkaido, the northernmost island in Japan. There are varieties of dialects within the island, but when people say ‘Hokkaido dialect’, they usually mean the dialect spoken in the biggest city in Hokkaido (Sapporo). In this blog post, ‘standard Japanese’ refers to the Japanese language spoken in Tokyo, ‘Hokkaido dialect’ refers to a dialect spoken in Sapporo, and ‘my dialect’ refers to a dialect spoken in my hometown.
Picture retrieved from https://www.gojapango.com/japan-map/
When I was in elementary and junior high school, I intentionally changed the way of speaking depending on whom I was speaking to. I spoke my dialect in school because it gave me a sense of belongings. I knew that people would talk behind me if I didn’t speak my dialect, so I forced myself to speak it in front of my classmates. On the other hand, when I was talking to my friends in other cities, I spoke either standard Japanese or Hokkaido dialect instead of my own dialect because I was embarrassed to speak my dialect outside my hometown. I completely stopped speaking my dialect when I was 15. I went to high school outside my hometown so I didn’t have to speak my dialect anymore (none of my family members spoke my dialect, and my close friends from my hometown also chose not to speak it). I was so relieved that I didn’t have to be careful about how I speak; it made me feel that I finally got out of the small community in my hometown that I had always hated.
I didn’t try to verbalize my feelings because “I don’t wanna speak my dialect because it sounds like an uneducated, poor countryfolk” sounds rude and offensive, but that was how I felt about my dialect. My hometown was famous for coal mining, but the last coal mine was closed when I was in 1st grade. My father was a Buddhist monk, so it didn’t affect my family, but many people lost their jobs and left the town. Most of those who remained in the town were poor and had nowhere else to go. There were 55 students in my grade, and only 5 of them went to universities. I was the only one who studied abroad, and probably the only one who didn’t need funding to go to university.
When I was talking with my friends who were living in other (usually bigger) cities, I was careful about how I spoke because I was afraid of being judged based on my accent. Collom (June, 2017) argues in her blog that “when we hear a certain type of accent, we’ll automatically pin a label on the person speaking and file them away into what we perceive to be their social status or category” (para. 2). On the other hand, social categories are fixed (Eckert, 2012). Speakers have agency, so they change the way of speaking to change their social categories (Eckert, 2012). For me, I refused to speak my dialect outside my hometown because I wanted to show, or probably just feel, that I didn’t belong to the same category as most of my classmates.
For a long time, I felt guilty that I had a chance to go to university abroad while many of my classmates didn’t even have a chance to think about it, but now I think that I didn’t have to feel guilty for having the chance; I should have realized that I was judging my classmates and felt guilty for being embarrassed to speak my dialect. I feel ashamed of myself.
References
Collom, K. (2017, June 5). Why does your accent affect people’s perception of you?. Retrieved from https://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/2017/06/05/why-does-your-accent-affect-peoples-perception-of-you/
Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology. 41(June), 87-100.
Yuri, your fifteen-year-old self couldn’t help feeling and acting the way she did. Your adult self is much more wise and tolerant—perhaps capable of forgiving her. This story will resonate with ANYBODY who has moved from a small town to a larger urban centre. It’s a powerful and enduring theme in life and literature. The shame should be on the side of the snobbish and arrogant cosmopolites!
It’s true that the language we speak reflects our originality and this accent from birth is not to change even after years of living in another place. I was born in a small city in Northeastern China, where people speak Mandarin with a slightly different accent. I didn’t come to realize this difference until I left my hometown to go to university in Beijing, where most people supposedly speak standard Mandarin. After living in Beijing for 15 years, my accent more or less changed (not intentionally though) , however, I find myself speaking in my hometown accent whenever I’m extremely nervous, worried angry or exhilarated. So the language we spoke from birth is indeed part of our identity even without being noticed.