This dissertation investigates the practices by which local language activists and college students in the Touhoku (Tōhoku 東北) region reproduce and challenge stigma toward local language (“dialect,” “accent”). Touhoku has for decades been a source of labor and other resources for the national economy of Japan which favors the urban core, and language standardization reinscribes Touhoku speakers as belonging to a periphery. People of this region, subject to metropolitan cultural hegemony in the post-war period, often came to bear an inferiority complex about local culture due to linguistic discrimination and cultural marginalization. Registers of local language here tend to absorb weighty meaning from social relations of power, as emblems of...