Online Session B1

Life, Work, and Death in Asia and Beyond

Indonesian and Polish press death notices from the perspective of gender studies 

Przemyslaw Wiatrowski 

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the linguistic image of women and men hidden in Indonesian and Polish press death notices. There is a considerable geographical and cultural difference between the Indonesian and Polish communities; the languages spoken by them belong to distant language families and feature a significant typological diversity. The text corpus consists of 2,789 Indonesian press death notices excerpted from two dailies: "Pikiran Rakyat" and "Kompas" (2015–2018). The collection of Polish obituaries (2019–2020) includes 13,297 texts from two dailies: "Gazeta Pomorska" and "Głos Wielkopolski". The subject of the analysis are linguistic and non-linguistic ways of designating deceased women and men. A comparison of texts representing a parallel genre of speech used by both communication communities to announce someone's death may bring interesting observations about the cultural determinants of shaping the image of women and men in a borderline situation such as a person's death. This approach may also allow to answer the question about possible asymmetries in depicting representatives of both sexes in the linguistic context.

One story, Two cultures: Comparing cross-linguistic neurodivergent speech styles in Japanese- and English-language media 

Vance Schaefer, Tamara Warhol

Neurotypical speakers manipulate various speech styles in their linguistic repertoire throughout their daily interactions: regional dialects, (im)politeness registers, and sociolects of gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, and more. Speakers read situations and accordingly select (i.e., translanguage) among speech styles to express multiple fluid identities, evolving relationships, and changing stances. By contrast, neurodivergent speakers deploy a more restricted linguistic repertoire of speech styles (Higashida, 2017). For example, in Japanese, speakers on the autism spectrum demonstrate little and/or late development of non-standard (i.e., regional dialects) and/or non-polite forms (Matsumoto et al., 2020), using polite forms in all situations (Kikuchi, 2018). 

This research presentation compares neurodivergent speech styles used by a protagonist on the autism spectrum with savant syndrome in Japanese and American versions of the TV show “The Good Doctor” (cf., Korean original). The Japanese protagonist regularly uses polite, standard language, largely devoid of regional dialect, male-gendered forms, youth language, and sentence-final particles marking emotion/stance. Paralinguistic features “overexaggerate” Japanese behavior: limited eye contact, physical contact, facial expression, and flat intonation. The significance of the study is that neurodivergent speakers possess their own valid, unique culture and speech styles and that media may simultaneously advocate for neurodiversity while exploiting stereotypes as entertainment among neurotypical culture.

Three stories - one wish: Vietnamese families' endeavours in nurturing Vietnamese languages in Australia  

Hao Tran, Duong Nguyen

Promoting Asian languages is pivotal for fostering social cohesion in Australia. However, despite a growing Vietnamese community, Vietnamese remains marginalized in mainstream education and its language maintenance has been predominantly entrusted to parents and their own decisions. Whether parents opt to instruct Vietnamese at home, the underlying reasons, and their strategies and challenges need further attention. Employing a collaborative autoethnography methodology through storying lived experience of instilling Vietnamese for children and with children in home, our study explores the stories and perspectives encompassing the practices and challenges that three distinctive families faced in maintaining Vietnamese. This includes one mix-race Australian-Vietnamese family and two Vietnamese families, who are also experts in language education. Considering family language policy framework, our study elucidates the importance of nurturing the love of the language to their children together with the preservation of cultural identity and connections with their homeland and fostering the children’s global citizenship. We also underscore the significance of home-based Vietnamese language sustaining as a foreign language, a second language or as first language following the parents’ practices. Our study aims to set a foundational basis for the formulation of policies, especially for minor community languages within the multifaceted context of Australian multiculturalism.

Discursive re-articulation of the employment system in Japan 

Minjoo Lee 

Lifelong or long-term employment, seniority wage system, and corporate unions have been identified as unique and critical characteristics of the employment system in Postwar Japan. With the prolonged economic recession and subsequent transition toward neoliberalism since the 1990s, however, Japan has seen significant changes in this unique employment system, exemplified by an upsurge of non-regular employment, the introduction of a performance-based assessment system, a steady rise in career changes, etc. Drawing on the articles and video clips posted on recruitment agencies’ online sites in Japan, such as the know-how to change a workplace or career offered by experts, stories about successful career changes and their working experiences by workers, advertising clips of recruitment agency companies, etc., this paper explores how those changes in the employment system in Japan have been currently gaining discursive currency by competing or negotiating with the traditional ones. This paper especially investigates how various notions, including competency and employability, flexibility and risk management, precarious employment and job security, gender and age, etc., are re-articulated to create and valorize new subjectivities of workers, work ethics, and meanings of work and career in the discourses surrounding the changing employment system in Japan.