Gengo seikatsu
The study of language life in Japan, 1945–1995
The indigenous concept of language life developed out of dialectology and attempts to establish a modern standard language. At first, language life existed above all merely as a label for the joint study of Japanese and its speakers and it only became an essential component of Japanese linguistics after 1945. Within the post-war studies a distinction can be drawn between an empirical approach at the National Japanese Language Research Institute and a theoretical approach by Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967). A first wave of language life studies subsided in the 1960s, the empirical approach was, however, revived and further developed in the seventies finding support in sociolinguistics. Language life was finally displaced by sociolinguistics in the mid-eighties.