Manga is Japanese comics and graphic novels, which are gaining ground with amazing speed in the U.S. and elsewhere. Manga can be used as a good resource for learning Japanese. How close is the language used in Manga to standard Japanese? How can it be used in the Japanese classroom? My research project attempts to answer these questions by building up and analyzing a corpus based upon popular Manga.
As in real life, in Manga, a character’s vocabulary and grammar vary greatly according to the person’s attributes (gender, age, social status, occupations, regions of residence or birthplace, appearance, personality, etc.). An emerging field of linguistics research examines the association between types of characters portrayed and their spoken language features in popular culture and media. Sets of spoken language features and phonetic characteristics psychologically associated with particular character types are called “role language”, yakuwari-go (Kinsui 2003). Their fictional utterances often make these establish character types easily recognizable in Japanese culture, even if actual people fitting these character types may not produce such utterances in real life.
In this project, while exploring the notion of role language to a specific case, by using an analysis tool “Co-Chu”, we build a Manga corpus to answer the above
mentioned questions. We also aim to make a useful word list for most frequently used nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and onomatope for Manga for JSL (Japanese-as-second-language) learners. Once we have built a manga corpus, the results will be compared to the results of Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation) compiled by Koiso et al., (2020) in order to examine if/how the language used in Manga is close to Japanese used in everyday conversation.
The impact of this project includes
· Advancing our sociolinguistics knowledge of Japanese as well as understanding of “Role Languages” in pop culture and media.
· Promoting the learning of the Japanese language as well as Japanese culture.
· Releasing the useful word lists for the manga for the students of Japanese, and Anime club at Tech (Anime O-Tecch!).
Proceedings and Projects
Kyoko Masuda & Yuko Yamamoto, “Jendaa hyoogen o kangaeru: Manga to nichijoo kaiwani arawareta bunmatsu hyoogen no hikaku bunseki o tooshite” [Examining gendered expressions in Manga and CEJC Corpora.] Proceedings of Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum (forthcoming, 2022)
Kyoko Masuda & Noriko Iwasaki, "Manga ni tsukawareru onomatoope: Manga o tanoshimu tame no onomatope shidoo o kangaeru” [The Role of Sound Symbolic Words in Japanese Manga: Suggestions to help students understand mimetic words and enjoy manga]. Proceedings of the 16th Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Europe Pedagogy Symposim (forthcoming, 2022)
Eboni Goar, (GT M.S. in Global Media and Culture-Japanese) M.S. thesis “Heroes and villians in Japanese manga” (expected to complete in August 2022)
Presentation
Kyoko Masuda, "Language, gender, and Japanee Shoojo Manga: What can we learn from the study of gendered interaction aparticles?” School of Modern Language Pedagogy Workshop, Georgia Institute of Technology, April 28th, 2022