A New York Times essay by author Emily Parker titled “Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?” caught my fancy over the weekend. In the commentary, Parker writes about how communications technologies have changed the written Japanese for better or worse.
She highlights a viewpoint from author, Minae Mizumura, who claims in his book, “The Fall of Japanese in the Age of English,” that the written Japanese language has spiralled down in its quality due to the pervasiveness of English thanks to the Japanese education system that emphasizes the importance of this language at the expense of Japanese, and the Internet which is predominantly an English medium.
Parker then shares about the popularity of cellphone text novels which are embraced by Japanese women through this excerpt:
Some of the most dramatic transformations have been taking place on cellphones, where writers, often young women, type stories into their keypads and readers consume them on their screens. Sentences tend to be short, and love stories are popular. The phenomenon peaked in 2007, when five out of 10 of the year’s best-selling books were written on cellphones.
These novels rely on this hybrid Japanese language and the implication here is that this medium of storytelling might change the traditional form of novel.
In a contrasting viewpoint, however, Parker shows the viewpoint of Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, who says:
My personal view on the Japanese language (or any language) is, If it wants to change, let it change. Any language is alive just like a human being, just like you or me. And if it’s alive, it will change. Nobody can stop it.” There is no such thing as simplification of language, he added. “It just changes for better or worse (and nobody can tell if it is better or worse).”
She ends on a positive note that the way the Japanese language is being simplified might help for more people to comprehend the language, which is especially helpful in the future when Japan might see an influx of immigrants.
In my J201 class, we learn about writing for the Internet. In many ways, simplification – easy structures, short sentences – is the key to writing for the medium. And as more and more engage the Internet as a primary source for information, would written English adapt to this new simplified version so much so that quality goes out of the window?
I’m sure there are tons of scholarly papers on this issue, but in general I feel that simplification of the written language is a great thing. In this day and age, having a literate populace is great for productivity. You need a society that can read to energize the economy. By simplifying the language, China pulled billions out of illiteracy and ramp up its economy.
Nevertheless, like Murakami says, language is always evolving and it would be exciting to see how the Internet changes the writing as a whole.
