Asian and African Languages and Linguistics, No.14, 2020 Ecology and Identity in Koineization: Cake Baking in a Diaspora Brazilian Portuguese Speech Community in Japan 1 MATSUMOTO, Kazuko The University of Tokyo OKUMURA, Akiko The University of Tokyo This paper examines the ecology and identity observed in a diaspora Brazilian Portuguese speech community in Jōsō City, Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan where an immigrant koiné is newly emerging. Our participant observation of and ethnographic interviews with 60 participants as well as the sociodemography of the research site are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Adopting the cake-baking metaphor (Britain 2012) that views research methods in koiné formation as analogous to cooking, it investigates the ingredients of koiné by exploring the participants’ places of origin and occupational and educational backgrounds, and the languages in competition in Jōsō City, as well as the recipe for koiné by observing and analyzing the social life of the participants and their ethnographic setting in Jōsō City (i.e., their integration into local Japanese and Brazilian communities) and within/beyond Japan (i.e., their transnational mobility between Japan and Brazil as well as geographical mobility within Japan). Narratives on their sense of belonging and identity, which second-generation participants voluntarily initiated, are also examined. These depictions, it is hoped, will enable our future work to better account for the formation and development of this newly emergent immigrant koiné in the local context. Keywords: sense of belonging, transnational mobility, linguistic landscape, cake-baking metaphor, Japanese Brazilian immigrants 1. Introduction 2. Background to Brazilian immigrants in Japan 3. Data and methodology 4. Theoretical motivations 5. Ecology and identity in a Brazilian immigrant community in Japan 6. Conclusion MATSUMOTO, Kazuko and OKUMURA, Akiko. 2020. “Ecology and Identity in Koineization: Cake Baking in a Diaspora Brazilian Portuguese Speech Community in Japan”. Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 14. pp.197–244. https://doi.org/10108/94523. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1 We would like to thank all those in Jōsō City who kindly co-operated with our research; Livia Oushiro for her helpful feedback and insightful observation on rhotics in Brazilian Portuguese; Flavia Feijo for her dedication to our data collection; and our research assistant, Yue Teng for her invaluable contributions to the progress of this research. All remaining mistakes and inadequacies are our own.