Problems, Solutions, And Hypotheses In The Study Of The language Of Japanese-Brazilians From The Federal District Of Brazil

Abstract

Despite accounting for one of the largest communities of foreign origin in Brazil, Japanese-Brazilians have not yet been put under the spotlight by dialectological studies. The most notable exception to that underperforming of Japanese-Brazilian dialectology is Yuko Takano’s work. The author has recently (2013) published a PhD thesis under the title of Esboço do Atlas do Falar dos Nipo-Brasileiros do Distrito Federal (= Outline of the Atlas of the Language of Japanese-Brazilians from the Federal District), whose corpus was subject to due dialectometrical — i.e., quantitative — processing in her Post-Doc dissertation (2018). Both studies remain unparalleled: there is no other linguistic atlas or dialectometric study of the Japanese-Brazilian linguistic system yet. In this paper we take on Takano’s corpus and discuss its methodological and analytical achievements. We compare the first set of achievements with the knowledge that a century and a half of scientific dialectology bequeathed to us, discussing the gain and loss in efficiency brought about by the methodological adaptations that were undertaken by Takano in order to study such a specific linguistic system. With regard to the second group of achievements, i.e., the results provided by Takano’s analyses, we expand the author’s corpus to include the Japanese and Portuguese language systems — that is, the base-systems of the Japanese-Brazilian mixed variety —, thus making it possible to (i) test the results of the author's dialectometric study in light of the genetics of the Japanese-Brazilian variety and (ii) compare the dialectological patterns of that variety with the ones found in the other Brazilian varieties that were subjected to the same type of analysis (Southern Brazil and the Amazonas state). We therefore proceed to a fundamental argument: it is necessary to quickly develop a strong body of Japanese-Brazilian dialectological studies, as the respective linguistic varieties are under strong pressure and have an exceptional cultural interest.