ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistics in Japan is a vibrant field of research involving Japanese and several other languages spoken in Japan and/or with which speakers of Japanese are in contact in Japan and elsewhere. Currently investigated topics and applied methods betray a certain influence of research in English-speaking countries; however, the language arrangements and social environments that are the subjects and settings of research are distinctly Japanese.
This chapter briefly recapitulates the history of Japanese sociolinguistics from late nineteenth-century language planning activities for establishing a national language to the preoccupation with domestic and migration-induced linguistic diversity a century later. It is a history from heterogeneity to homogeneity and back. Writing reform and the relationship between spoken and written language have been central topics of Japanese sociolinguistics from its inception, because of the wide gap between writing and speaking and because of the intricate writing system, its Chinese origin and Japanese appropriation.
