Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 285

students of Japanese, and 3) Japanese native speakers. The number
of the subjects in each group was as follows: 1) 13 (four male and
nine female students), 2) 8 (four male and four female students),
and 3) 9 (one male and eight female students). There was an imbal-
ance in the distribution of male and female students in groups 1)
and 3), due to the limited number of native Icelandic speakers
studying Japanese, as well as of native Japanese speakers living in
Iceland. Due to these limitations, and the nature of this explorato-
ry study as such, a broad observation of tendencies will be offered
in preference to statistical analysis. at the outset of the experiment,
it was not certain whether a clear distinction could be made be -
tween groups 1) and 2), given that the difference between them
consisted in only one extra year of language study. at the time of
the experiment, group 1) had studied Japanese and kana syllabaries
for nine months and was already quite familiar with the transliter-
ation of loan words from Icelandic/English into Japanese.
However, longer exposure to the language may potentially make a
difference in the transliteration process, and so, it was decided to
observe the two groups separately.6 The subjects in group 3) were
native speakers of Japanese. Six of them had lived in Iceland for
about nine months, two had never been to Iceland and had had no
exposure to the language, and one had lived in Iceland for about
two-and-a-half years. Five of the group spoke Tokyo dialect. Of the
others, two were from the Kansai area, one from Okinawa, and one
from Hokkaido, although no distinct dialectal accent could be
observed in their daily conversation. The language background of
both the Icelandic and Japanese subjects was rather diverse, in that
many of them had some knowledge of languages other than
Japanese and Icelandic. This is an additional reason for the choice
of an observation methodology, rather than statistical analysis.
2.3 Procedure
Separate recordings were made of all the names pronounced by a
native speaker of Icelandic (recording I) and the possible pronun-
ciations in Japanese, as read by a native speaker of Japanese (re -
KaOru uMEZaWa
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6 The first year students have spent 190 hours in class, whereas the second year students have
spent 380 hours. The core textbook contains 600 vocabulary words for the 1st year, and
another 600 for the 2nd year (1200 vocabulary words in total).
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