The thesis examines recent tendencies of linguistic diversification in Japan by focusing on language use on signs in the streets of Tokyo. The study of written language in public space is a newly developing sociolinguistic subfield now commonly referred to as linguistic landscape research.
Apart from a general introduction and a brief outline of the local setting in chapters 1 and 2, the thesis consists of three major parts. Chapter 3 explores the semiotic properties of language use on signs and gives an overview of previous approaches to the topic. Chapter 4 deals with the administrative background to Tokyo's linguistic landscape, demonstrating that the appearance of languages and scripts other than Japanese in the streets of Tokyo to a considerable extent is the result of official language planning activities. Chapter 5 discusses the findings of a large-scale empirical survey about multilingual signs conducted in spring 2003 in the centre of Tokyo. It introduces ten categories for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 2,444 signs recorded by digital camera. The concluding chapter of the thesis summarises the main findings about Tokyo's signs of multilingualism, their writers, their readers, and the language contact situation as a whole.
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