Why linguistic “mistakes” are relevant for all the wrong reasons

Photo by Jelleke Vanoothegem on Unsplash

Key findings

• Laypeople talk at length about linguistic “mistakes” and associate them with moral evaluations
• Behind what constitutes a “mistake” lay pervasive language ideologies functional to the construction and maintenance of the“standard” variety of language
• Linguistic “mistakes” are associated with shame and shame-related internal states
• As linguists, we should make an effort to recognise the ideologies that guide our own ways of speaking and writing, so as not to project them onto the data we are analysing

言語間違いと感情

間違いとは何か？辞書によると、間違いとは規範に違反する行動である。従って、言語間違いとは文法、形態、または統語のルール規則に従わない言葉遣いと言われる。本校では日本語とフランス語を比較しながら言語間違いの概念、道徳との関連、そして間違った（または誰かに間違いを指摘された）場合湧いた/起きた感情/それによって起きた感情を簡潔に説明する。

ウェブサイトから収集したデータをコーパス言語学の研究方法で分析した結果、そのデータの中でフランス語のfaute d’orthographe と日本語の「漢字の間違い」が話題になることが多いことがわかった。この二つの表現の文脈を見ていくと、faute d’orthographe と漢字の間違いが起きた瞬間、ネガティブな感情（恥や恥ずかしさなど）を持つことがよくある。なぜかならば、「正しい」言語の使い方は社会的・道徳的な価値と結び付いているからである。

要するに、フランス語と日本語は語学的に遠く言語であり、「間違い」とは何か文化によって異っても、間違いの種類、間違いが引き起こす批判やネガティブな感情はフランス語と日本語の共通していることが明らかになった。フランス語と日本語のような異なる言語は社会や権力関係に深い関わりがあるのが確かである。

“Linguistic mistake”?

As a foreign language learner, I’ve always tried very hard to avoid making “mistakes” when speaking or writing in a language that was not Italian – I occasionally get stressed also with Italian, but that is another story. Research is often a way for me to reflect on my own lived experiences, and recently I have been thinking a lot about the fact that I have internalised the very same norms of linguistic correctness I try to challenge in my work. This motivated me and my colleague Licia Reggiani to do an exploratory analysis of the ways in which people use the terms machigai 間違い ‘mistake’ and faute ‘mistake’ in Japanese and French online communication.

“Mistake” (quotes intentional), as intended here, does not refer to the content (i.e., whether language reflects reality) or the communicative success of the interaction (whether interactants’ recognise one another’s communicative intentions), but to its form – although its roots extend well beyond form alone. In other words, I’m not talking about linguistic mistakes that cause misunderstandings or communication breakdowns, but merely formal digressions from what we perceive to be “correct”, hence legitimate, that do not preclude mutual intelligibility.

The study

More specifically, in our study we asked:

• What kind of linguistic behaviour do people frame as a “mistake” in Japanese and French?
• What are the consequences for who committed the mistake?

To answer them, we looked our two focus words up in the comparable web corpora JaTenTen11 for Japanese and FrTenTen20 for French, which are provided by Sketch Engine.

The analysis of collocates revealed that in Japanese people often associate machigai with kanji 漢字, in the construction kanji no machigai 漢字の間違い ‘kanji mistake’. For those who may not be familiar with the Japanese writing system, kanji are Chinese characters introduced to Japan around the VI century. Nowadays, they represent one of the four orthographic forms of expressions in Japanese, together with two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, and the Roman alphabet or rōmaji. Kanji are by far the most complex, because for most kanji at least two ways of reading must be learned (Shibatani 1990, 128–130). What reading is appropriate depends on whether the kanji is used alone or in combination with other characters, and in the latter case, what characters it is combined with. To give a simple example, the kanji 生, which semantically refers to ‘life’ and related meanings, has multiple readings, some of which are sei, shō, nama, i(kiru), u(mareru), o(u), ha(eru). To further complicate things, and despite the strict and deliberate implementation of language ideologies aimed at linguistic uniformity around Japan (Heinrich 2012, 81) from the Meiji period (1868–1912) onwards, words or expressions usually written in kanji can also be creatively transcribed using other writing systems, or vice versa, occasionally with pragmatic effects.

It is not surprising then that even native speakers of Japanese can have a hard time with kanji! Here are a few examples taken from the Q&A website Yahoo! Chiebukuro, which are meant to complement the corpus-based analysis with a more qualitative perspective on the topic:

Nengajō no bunshō de go-jiai kudasai no go [hiragana] o go [kanji] to kanji de kaku no wa machigai na n deshō ka? Go[kanji]-ai kudasai wa, ayamari aruiwa futekisetsuna hyōgen na no deshō ka? Shirabeta no desu ga yoku wakarimasen deshita. Yoroshiku o-negai itashimasu.
年賀状の文章でご自愛くださいのごを御と漢字で書くのは間違いなんでしょうか? 御自愛くださいは、誤りあるいは不適切な表現なのでしょうか? 調べたのですがよく分かりませんでした。 よろしくお願いいたします。
‘Is it a mistake to write the “go” in “go [hiragana]-jiai kudasai [‘take care of yourself’]” as “go” [kanji] in a New Year’s greeting card message? Is “go [hiragana]-jiai kudasai” considered incorrect or inappropriate wording? I researched it, but I’m not entirely sure. Thank you in advance’.

Torihiki saki nado ni tsukau mēru bun to shite, o-sewa ni na [kanji] rimasu. to iu kanji no tsukaikata wa machigai deshō ka? Donata ka kuwashii kata go kaitō yoroshiku o-negai itashimasu.
取引先などに使うメール文として、お世話に成ります。という漢字の使い方は間違いでしょうか？どなたか詳しい方ご回答宜しくお願い致します。
‘Is it incorrect to use the kanji “o-sewa ni na [kanji] rimasu [‘you take good care of me’]” in an email to business partners and others? I would appreciate it if someone with expertise could provide an answer.’

These examples show that the widespread use word-processing technology brought about a shift from writing to recognising and selecting characters correctly (Coulmas 2018, 129). This shift partly contributes to the emergence of creative variety in contemporary Japanese but, as our data shows, this does not mean that people can afford to ignore normative standard discourses on language that emphasise the link between language correctness and credibility (Heumann 2022, 53).

Despite Japanese and French being two typologically very different languages, a similar tendency was observed in the French data, where the most common type of mistake people talk about is faute d’orthographe ‘orthographic mistake’. Similarly to Japan, in fact, starting from the XVII century France saw the creation (imposition?) of a shared understanding of what language ought to be, which was ultimately functional to the political agenda of the time. At the core of what constitutes linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991) in France lay notions of orthographic correctness (Paveau & Rosier 2008). Below is a brief yet effective example showing that the negative evaluation triggered by a linguistic mistake, and potentially extended to its producer, is observable also in the French data, where a mistake is framed as a deviation from the norm worth an apology.:

J espere d’ avoir repondu a ta questionne et je me excuse pour main fautes d’ortographie

In line with the negative evaluation that emerged from the analysis, a further examination of the adjectives that collocate with machigai and faute revealed that they are often associated with negative emotions, clearly exemplified in Japanese by the adjective hazukashii ‘embarassing’, and indexed in French by, e.g., inexcusable and impardonnable. The close reading of textual examples corroborated the assumption that a linguistic mistake can have quite serious emotional consequences for the producer, who reports to haji o kaita 恥をかいた ‘be ashamed’, feeling kimochi warui 気持ち悪い ‘disgusting’ and a grande honte.

In sum

To conclude, the analysis, although explorative, showed that, in the Japanese as well as in the French data, dominant language ideologies are pervasive, emotionally charged and functional to the maintenance of the “standard” variety. As linguists, we should constantly make an effort to recognise the ideologies that guide our own ways of speaking and writing, so as not to project our acquired preconceived notions of what is “correct” and what is not onto the data we are analysing. On a more personal note, it is probably about time I start being more forgiving with my own linguistic mistakes…

Selected references
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Coulmas, F. (2018). Writing and Literacy in Modern Japan. In Y. Hasegawa (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (1st ed., pp. 114–132). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316884461
Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.; 1. publ. in paperb., repr). Polity Press.
Heinrich, P. (2012). The making of Monolingual Japan: Language ideology and Japanese modernity. Multilingual Matters.
Heuman, A. (2022). Trivializing language correctness in an online metalinguistic debate. Language & Communication, 82, 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2021.11.007
Paveau, M.-A., & Rosier, L. (2008). La langue française: Passions et polémiques. Vuibert.