- 著者
-
小林 勝法
- 出版者
- 文教大学
- 雑誌
- 言語と文化 = Language and Culture (ISSN:09147977)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.32, pp.93-111, 2020-03-16
I examined 116 school songs of private universities which I found through their websites or by contacting them, in order to analyze their characteristics. Of them, 110 universities (94%) had established school songs. I obtained and investigated the lyrics of 109 of those by classifying them into the following time periods according to the year they were established:Old system period (1920-1947) : The period of the old school system Expansion period (1948-1988) : The period after World War II, when many universities were establishedHeisei period (1989-2014):The period when the 18-year-old population began to decline, women's colleges became coeducational, and junior colleges became universitiesUpon text mining the lyrics, I found the following characteristics:・In the lyrics, 75 of the university songs included the name of the university (69%), 36 mentioned the founding spirit (33%), and 73 had details including the name and features of the landscape where the university was located(67%).・The words that appeared most often in the lyrics were "my", "our" (246 times)," Oh!" (84 times)," world" (75 times), and "alma mater" (61 times).・Many of the frequently appearing words were common to both the old system and expansion periods which extolled the spirit of young people studying to seek their ideals, bring honor to their alma mater, and make history.・Inspiration, and support for life and school life appeared to be characteristic of university songs in the expansion and Heisei periods with words like “dreams", "friends", and "flowers" appearing often. The trend grew even stronger in the latter period where I observed words like "tomorrow", "future", and "youth". The increasing in the ratio of university admission has changed the university culture and student temperament, and this is reflected in the characteristics of the school songs.