Language Diversity in Japan: Sociolinguistic Explorations in Tokyo’s Ameyoko Shopping Street and Yomitan Village in Okinawa

Today, Japan’s linguistic diversity is no longer disputed. Linguistic diversity includes autochthonous languages such as Ainu, Ryukyuan or Japanese Sign Language; community languages from immigrants such as Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Nepalese; and religious languages such as Sanskrit or Latin (Maher 2022). Japanese is also diverse and includes regional variation employed in constantly evolving new contexts filled with new social meanings (Kobayashi 2018). It is an important achievement of Japanese sociolinguistic research of the past decades that Japan’s long-standing monolingual and monocultural myth has been debunked. At the same time, linguistic diversity and multilingualism often remain poorly understood. In this article, I explore some aspects of the versatility and benefits of Japan’s linguistic diversity by zooming in on two specific cases. First, I report on language use in a shopping street in northeast Tokyo (Ameyoko) and then explore the nexus between different