Creating custom message app stickers to promote language use - The example of Hachijō
Presenter(s)
Affiliation
Topic
Digital Society and Language Learning
Type
Papers
Abstract
Hachijō (八丈, simply called Shima-kotoba 島言葉 or ‘island words’ by its native speakers) is a critically endangered minority language of Japan, traditionally spoken on the southern half of the Izu archipelago (south-east of Tōkyō).
Although there is no official census of the remaining number of native speakers, the intergenerational transmission of the language was interrupted some time after World War II, and it is likely that only a few hundred fluent elderly speakers remain to this day.
As a result, Hachijō was included in Unesco’s Atlas of the world languages in danger in 2009, which dramatically raised awareness in Japan, and triggered several local initiatives to revitalise the language, especially among children. Namely, Hachijō is now often on public display in the islands (on welcome signs and ‘word of week’ tables), memory card games are being taught in schools, and various events were created in order to promote the visibility of the language.
However, these projects remain somehow limited. Notably, while Japan is famous for its technology and while many Japanese children and teenagers use a smartphone everyday, paradoxically, very few revitalisation initiatives were specifically designed toward users of technological media.
Thus, this presentation will be dedicated to a new project, namely the creation of custom message app stickers (mostly for LINE, Messenger and WhatsApp) using the local language, and to the various questions that such a project raises (how to pick iconic words and useful sentences, how to deal with topolectal variation, how to release custom stickers, how to assess the efficiency of such an initiative, etc.).
The presented Hachijō stickers are targeted toward the islanders, and were created in association with a professional cartoonist from Ōkagō village, who is locally famous for her drawings using the local language, which are frequently purchased as ‘linguistic souvenirs’.
