Wesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020)

New Books in Sociology · Jan 29, 2021 · 56m

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three…