After Language Standardization: Dialect Cosplay in Japan

Japanese is in most liklihood the most standardized language in the world, but the pendlum has started to swing back towards destandarization in the past two to three decades. Playing with dialect elements in order to evoke stereotypes about regional speakers is one aspect of language destandaridzation. It is called 'dialect cosplay' in Japanese, but we can find similar ludic uses of languages also in other countries. Language standardization processes come to an end, and we need to reflect how this can be studied in contemporary sociolinguistics.