From the turn of the 19th century, Japan has undergone significant dialect leveling. There is thus an exigent demand for understanding not only dialect speaker population changes, but also how the linguistic capital (Bordieu, 1991) of Japanese dialects is shifting against the standard language ideology.

In sociolinguistic research on Japanese, the Osaka dialect (OD) has occupied the largest share of attention. Previous research has shown that it can be used as a marker of masculinity and affiliation (Strutz-Sreetharan, 2017; King et al., 2021), as a marker of alterity (Ball, 2004), as a means for managing footing (Barke, 2018), or as less-formal speech style (Okamoto, 2008). However, no studies investigate how OD-specific resources are utilized by caregivers in early childhood to (re)produce these social meanings. Furthermore, no studies have investigated how the process of language socialization differs in different regions of Japan from the perspective of dialect style-shifts. 

Utilizing language socialization theory (Ochs & Scheifflin, 1984) and interactional linguistic methods (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2017), this paper addressed the following questions: (i) how do caregivers in OD speaking households use utterance-final particle nen as a resource for socialization, and (ii) how do their practices construct the indexical field (Eckert, 2012) of OD? Analysis of the 8 hour video-audio recordings of caregiver-child (4;6) interactions showed that although both children and caregivers use nen as a means of encoding epistemic stance both at the local level (i.e., an epistemic gap between speaker and recipient) and at the macro level (i.e., an epistemic gap between the social groups containing the speaker and the recipient), caregivers' usage of nen was significantly less than that of the child. The study concludes with the implications of these findings for the core indexical function of nen and future directions for researching language variation as a resource for language socialization.