ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the inquiry a step further to examine and understand both the linguistic constraints and the socio-cultural expectations associated with script choice by native Japanese speakers. It shows that these choices, consciously or unconsciously, are often associated with the writers’ social identities and may be used to manipulate or construct such identities. Japanese writing employs a mixture of four scripts: the morphographic kanji, the two moraic kana systems, hiragana and katakana, and the Latin alphabet referred to in Japanese as romaji. The socio-cultural associations matter a great deal in the writing of triple-script words and have been found to predispose native writers to choosing one script over another based on the qualities most congruent with the given context. Violation of script choice conventions could achieve emphatic effects, much like using bold or italics in writing English, and it is a tactic sometimes used in advertisement.
