Language transmission in Japanese/Thai intermarriage families in Chiang Mai, Thailand:
the role of Japanese supplementary school and parental school choice
The Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA)
- Date: November 25th 2023
- Venue: International Conference Center Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan
Sachiyo Fujita-Round
Yokohama City University
Abstract Form for Oral Presentation
The definition of the Japanese term Kokusaikekkon (intermarriage) refers to “a marriage between persons of different nationalities”, not like intermarriage in the American context as marriage “between persons deriving from those different in-groups and out-groups other than the family, which is culturally conceived as relevant to the choice of a spouse” (Takeshita, 2016). In the Japanese context, unlike the one in the American context, it does not comprise a number of subcategories, including interracial marriage, interethnic marriage, interfaith marriage, and intercultural marriage, but it is more concerned with ‘nationality’. This leads to the misunderstanding that dual-national children from ‘intermarriage’ are naturally bi-lingual (native speakers of two languages of their parents).
Family is a language domain (Fishman, 1972) where language transmission occurs. Particularly for intermarriage, the family is a domain for language transmission of parents’ different languages since it is often the case that one of the parents is the majority of the society and the other is the minority. Thus, the minority language of the family is not always supported by the majority.
This study analyzes life history interviews conducted in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in January and February 2023. The informants are 18 Japanese spouses (14 Japanese wives, 4 Japanese husbands) and 1 Thai spouse (Thai wife, fluent in Japanese). All the interviews were conducted in Japanese.
As Nakamura (2019) cited De Houwer (1999), she suggested that parental attitudes and beliefs influence their linguistic choices and interaction strategies, affecting children’s language development. In the analysis of this study, it was shown that parental language attitudes and beliefs were constructed by their experiences. However, the unique finding is that the role of Chiang Mai Japanese supplementary school, a semi-official school supported by Japanese government and the local Japanese association, creates a specific language domain for the children’s minority language, Japanese.