Heinrich Patrick. The Making of Monolingual Japan. Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity

Multilingual Matters, 2012. — 214 p. — ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-656-4This book is the result of several years of research into the languages of Japan as part of Japan’s history of thought. My interest in this topic began with a study of the reception of western linguistics in modern Japan for my PhD thesis, through which I came to understand that linguistics did not evolve in a vacuum but sought to provide solutions to problems exceeding those of language tout court. In Japan, there is a small branch of linguistics dedicated to what is called kokugo mondai (problems of national language).
Having dealt with the very broad topic of the reception of western linguistics, I decided to restrict my research to kokugo mondai for a while. I can still remember the first time I came across the small section on kokugo mondai at the library of the National Institute for Japanese Language in Tokyo. At the time, I was due to take a position at Duisburg University as an assistant to Florian Coulmas, and so I quickly wrote down the titles of all the books on kokugo mondai on the shelves there, with the intention of writing something on this issue during my time at Duisburg. I have long since left Duisburg, and so I can safely say that the topic demanded far more attention than the few books on the shelves at the National Institute for Japanese Language sug-gested. For this is more than just a book about the problems of a national language in Japan – it is about the problems caused by the idea of a national language too. In writing this book, it was not finding material that proved difficult, but deciding on how best to present what material. Undoing ideol-ogy demands the conscious questioning of ontological knowledge, but it is not easy to produce academic work on such shaky ground.