This is the collaborative research project by a sociolinguist and a video artist. In the present study, we aimed to create a documentary video in order to raise understanding of both the speaker's community and general public toward endangerment of the language, in another genre from academic linguistic ethnography described by the first author.
The first author's fieldwork of Miyakoan language spoken in the southern island of Okinawa in Japan is now situated as one of eight endangered language by UNESCO. Due to the Japanese modernization dating back to the Meiji period, the government's language standardization policy pushed the local languages aside and the problematic issue of this standardization was that the central government used the school as a vehicle to spread the standard language, Japanese, through education (Fujita-Round & Maher, 2008). Not only the language policy, but the language use in the island has been influenced by other social complex dilemma, described in May (2014) as the facts surrounding multilingual repertoires of speakers; "their locatedness, scale(Blommaert, 2010), flow and circulation (Heller, 2011) in a globalized world".
To project such nuanced and layered 'realities' of speakers, my video artist colleague joined in the first author's field site to video 5 times between 2015 and 2017. We videoed the local language speakers' talk during the interviews, hearing in the community and language related activities in the local gathering, which were intended by a researcher, then those video materials were edited by the artist colleague .
After the 'multilingual turn' articulated by May(2014), one of crucial
issues on the study of multilingualism can be how to raise the awareness of
speakers' 'nuanced' environment. A challenge to deliver this
'multilingual turn' is how to achieve understanding towards speakers'
multilingual language use and environment. We aimed to project the mission by creating a collection of holistic local voices in a form of documentary video.
Fujita-Round, S. & Maher, J.C. (2008) 'Language education policy in Japan' in S. May & N. Hornberger (eds). Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd edition, Volume 1. NY: Springer.
May, S. (2014) The Multilingual Turn. NY: Taylor & Francis.
