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Language change across the lifespan is relatively underexplored in sociolinguistics. While studies of individuals' language across life stages are often considered to complement large scale studies of community-level language change, this study aims to explore how changes to family environment and social mobility interact with individual speakers' stylistic practice across life stages. It examines ethnographic interviews of five women, originally from the same area in western Japan, the same high school, and similar socio-economic background, conducted by a single researcher eleven years apart. The chronological and inter-participant comparisons reveal a complex pattern of stylistic practice and stance taking as the women share stories about career, family and relationships with the researcher. The study also discusses audience design in language variation and explores how the participants utilise their discursive repertoires in their interaction with the researcher, whose background is significantly divergent from theirs. (Language across the lifespan, stylistic practice, Japanese)

This study analyses four women’s speech from Kobe who were interviewed by the same researcher in 1989 and in 2000. We focused on highly indexical pragmatic youth language features (discourse markers and end‐rising intonation) to understand about societal pressures that young women in Japan face when transitioning into adulthood. The analysis reveals a complex picture; some women use them more as time goes by, while others use them less. The vast ethnographic information helps us to understand their persona style (Eckert 2008), and to have an insight into their linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1978, Woolard 2008).

Japanese criminal trials have shifted towards a more adversarial orientation following major law reform implemented over the past 20 years. Lawyers have had to adapt to the new context of professional communication with lay judges, who sit with professional judges in some trials rather than taking the role of citizen juries. For the defence and prosecution, a need to ‘win the battle’ with convincing courtroom performance and communication strategies have posed challenges, while judges still have the power to take an investigative stance to pursue the truth. This article explores how the shift towards an adversarial orientation manifests itself in the courtroom, and discusses the dilemma over the need for courtroom performance focused on spoken language and the trust in written communication that traditionally dominated the criminal justice process.

This chapter explores Kanako’s 1989 and 2000 interviews by adopting an approach focusing on rapport, in which diachronic analysis of the data is embedded in the interview participants’ negotiation of identity and relationship in discourse. Stylistic features of the interview discourse such as regional variation, interactional particles, clause-final forms, as well as interaction dynamics are analyzed, while the life experiences of Kanako and the interview settings, are also considered. The analysis reveals a complex and nuanced negotiation of rapport between the researcher and Kanako as their social identities and shared aspects of life go through transformation over a decade.