Constructing a metalinguistic community through Kurdish at The Japan Kurdish Culture Association: Methodological Considerations and Metalinguistic Futurities

Set in Kawaguchi, Japan, (Author 2021) highlights analyses of virtual linguistic landscape and supporting interview data, both of which come from a larger ethnographic study conducted in partnership with a local Kurdish diaspora that migrated from Turkey. The results suggest that, in line with the concept of metalinguistic communities (Panel Organizers 2021), Kurdish retains an important symbolic function for members of the Japan Kurdish Culture Association (JKCA) in spite of many members’ Turkish-language dominance. Within in-group contexts, ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor 2019) of Kurdish into Turkish phrases allows members to tap into a proud historical narrative and “performatively memorialize” (Leopold 2020) the Kurds’ age-old struggle against assimilation. Within out-group contexts, the strategic integration of key Kurdish phrases into Kurdish cultural celebrations enhances the existentially authentic (Wang, 2000) framing of Kurdish culture that is packaged for local Japanese consumption.
Such practices help to advance two fundamental goals of the JKCA’s advocacy work: 1.) enhancing Kurdish migrants’ visibility to the Japanese public and 2.) distinguishing themselves from their non-Kurdish Turkish counterparts. With this distinction and visibility, the group shines a light on its own troubled history in Turkey and its initiatives to respectfully acculturate into Japanese society (outlined in Author 2020), ultimately presenting a case for Japanese policy makers to enact changes in their favor. Through this study’s adoption of an intercultural ethics that merges the product of research with the objectives of the community members who contribute to it (Phipps, 2013), it incorporates this goal of increasing exposure to influence migration policy as its own primary research aim.
Regarding the labeling of this group as a ‘metalinguistic community’, different levels of acceptance emerge, revealing divisions that largely stem from differing positionalities with respect to precarity. The study’s primary contact – a Kurdish-language instructor, Kurdish restaurant manager, and founder of the JKCA who is legally permitted to stay in Japan – envisions membership in a metalinguistic community in direct opposition to his efforts to maintain the vitality of Kurdish. At the same time, interviews with JKCA members and observations of their children – the majority of whom remain undocumented and face the prospects of deportation – demonstrate family language policies that prioritize Turkish and Japanese. A readiness to either continue in Japanese-medium schools or, if deported, re-enter Turkish schools places relatively minimal importance on intergenerational Kurdish-language transmission and greater acceptance of Kurdish-language usage for symbolic – rather than communicative – functions.
In line with McKenna and Main (2013), an understanding of these disparate positionality-based perspectives serves as a reminder to avoid relying too heavily on key informants like the founder of the JKCA, who, by virtue of his easier accessibility to researchers, frequently serve as a spokesperson for the community but is not representative of the majority of its members. This finding also draws attention to the researcher’s own positionality with respect to the accessibility of female JKCA members (the mothers of the Japanese-Turkish bilingual children): the researcher’s sex, Turkish language ability, and familiarity with the Kurdish-Turkish experience allowed for intimate interviews with female members of the community who had not contributed to the local Kurdish migrant narrative prior to this study. Acknowledgement of such opportunities also comes with reflections on the limitations of researcher positionality, which point to diminished access to the perspective of young working male voices, who tend to be more fully integrated into the Japanese community. Based on such opportunities and limitations, the work presented here, following Bucholtz and Hall (2005), necessarily reflects only a partial portrait of the community’s language ideologies and practices.