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This book provides a comprehensive overview of the rich linguistic diversity in Japan. Each chapter explores the history and current status of a specific language community, including indigenous languages such as Ryukyan, community languages such as Chinese and Portuguese, and languages of modernization and culture, such as English and French.

"Language is a social space, an aesthetic, a form of play and communication, a geographical reference, a jouissance, a producer of numerous social and personal identities. This book takes up salient issues of sociolinguistics with a specific focus on Japan: language and gender (the married name controversy), language and the 'portable' identities being fashioned around traditional, essentialist notions of ethnicity (metroethnicity) endangerment, slang, taboo and discriminatory language in Japanese especially regarding minorities, place-names from indigenous languages, the fellowship and parody of children's songs, and the diversity of nicknames among children and young people. This books gives radical and new perspectives on the sociolinguistics of Japanese"--

A name is not merely a personal identifier but an object over which state and corporate bodies regard themselves
as having the right of control. In the modern state, ideologies of citizenship, ethnocentrism, colonialism, have long entailed
the manipulation of personal names. The married change-name is, among other things, a psychological act, an imprinting
by society on the (bride-bridegroom) initiate's consciousness. A newly-coined married name encodes new
information about the man or woman. It connotes primarily that a new social relationship has occurred. A new name is
a symbol of allegiance to a new person, a new nexus of relations, a starting-over. Fufu
bessei is the practice
in Japan of the retention of former surnames after marriage. Retention of the surname is a ruptus in traditional
symbolic reference, a social and psychological discontinuity. A review of global practice regarding post-marriage naming
reveals no uniformity but rather variation. At the same time, there appears to be many possible reasons why an individual
decides to change or not to change. Marriage name-change/name-retention thus comprise an ideological speech-act: a
linguistic expression of a form of consciousness which sustains and legitimates a state of affairs or which, conversely,
indicates rejection of particular practices and institutions.

The languages of the world can be seen and heard in cities and towns, forests and isolated settlements, as well as on the internet and in international organizations like the UN or the EU. How did the world acquire so many languages? Why can't we all speak one language, like English or Esperanto? And what makes a person bilingual? Multilingualism, language diversity in society, is a perfect expression of human plurality. About 6,500-7,000 languages are spoken, written and signed, throughout the linguistic landscape of the world, by people who communicate in more than one language (at work, or in the family or community). Many origin myths, like Babel, called it a 'punishment' but multilingualism makes us who we are and plays a large part of our sense of belonging. Languages are instruments for interacting with the cultural environment and their ecology is complex. They can die (Tasmanian), or decline then revive (Manx and Hawaiian), reconstitute from older forms (modern Hebrew), gain new status (Catalan and Maori) or become autonomous national languages (Croatian). Languages can even play a supportive and symbolic role as some territories pursue autonomy or nationhood, such as in the cases of Catalonia and Scotland. In this Very Short Introduction John C. Maher shows how multilingualism offers cultural diversity, complex identities, and alternative ways of doing and knowing to hybrid identities