Terms of address and kinship in the Japanese family
Find out more about the winning 2024 project ‘Terms of address and kinship in the Japanese family: Influence of the school in language acquisition' from the Louis Dumont Fund, which supports research in social anthropology.
As part of her first year of a Master's degree in Asian Studies, Alice Charzat has developed a research project on the learning of language and politeness in Japanese children.
The issue guiding her research is to determine ‘How can the plurality of terms of address used by Japanese parents in the context of a nuclear family be explained? To guide her research, she is interested in the influence of schooling in this process of language acquisition.
Alice Charzat would like to continue this research during a field trip to Japan, with a number of objectives. She would like to highlight the methods used by Japanese children to learn language in nursery and early primary school, as well as the importance of language teaching (spoken and written) by a teacher at school to explain the rules of language. During her fieldwork, she would target language interactions that answered her questions, in particular during class time devoted to explaining the use of kinship terms and the recurrent use of certain terms, in the same context, by Japanese children.
Alice Charzat
Alice Charzat is a student in Master’s degree in Asian studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Language Sciences in 2022, during which she chose a professional career as a teacher at the Université Paris Cité (Paris Cité University). She has been learning Japanese for two years and want to converge her interest in school education and language acquisition.
Alice Charzat
