My last post dealt with English in Japanese advertising. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about English in the actual Japanese language.

Japanese contains a tremendous amount of loanwords (外来語, gairaigo in Japanese). The term gairaigo usually accounts for foreign words not borrowed from Chinese (the vast majority of which come from English). Gairaigo are written in a specific syllabary called katakana. Native Japanese is written in the hiragana (ひらがな) syllabary and kanji, loaned, Chinese characters. Katakana and Hiragana make identical sounds, differing only in appearance.

Note the straight-cut appearance of katakana compared to the curvy, flowing appearance of hiragana. Each syllabary has 40 members, and there are almost 3,000 kanji in modern usage.

All sounds in Japanese can be broken into vowels, a consonant followed by a vowel, and a single nasal sonorant, about 65 sounds in total. In comparison, English has over 300 sounds. This finite set of possible syllables in Japanese makes many foreign loanwords difficult to pronounce, and would appear to be a barrier to linguistic diffusion (especially from a phonetically diverse language such as English). However, Japanese contains a ludicrous amount of loanwords from English, French, Portugese and German. The list above is by no means comprehensive, and the list of gairaigo is estimated to be as high as 600.

Loanwords in Japanese have a few important differences from normal loanwords. Normally, loanwords fill a “meaning vacuum,” describing a concept for which there is no word in the receiving culture. Japanese, however, has taken foreign words for concepts with native Japanese equivalents, and many speakers choose to use the native words and their foreign equivalents interchangeably (although foreign words are thought of as cooler). Another difference between Japanese word-borrowing and the phenomenon in other languages is the creation of Wasei-eigo (which approximately translates to “made-in-Japan English”). Japanese speakers have invented brand-new words out of borrowed English words, many of which have no relation to existing English words or concepts. バリアフリー (bariafurī, “barrier free”), for example, is used to describe handicap-accessible facilities. Although describing something as “barrier free” in English is grammatically correct, I’ve never heard a native English speaker use the term to describe something handicap-accessible. アメリカンドッグ (amerikandoggu, “American dog”) is used to describe a corn dog. The phenomenon isn’t limited to English, either; the french word avec, meaning “with,” has been transliterated into アベック (abekku), and is used specifically to describe a romantic couple. Japanese can sometimes be combined with English to create new words, such as 電子レンジ (denshirenji). Denshi, meaning “electron,” is combined with the English word “range” to mean “microwave oven.”

Concerning the prevalence and usage of gairaigo, James Brown of Niigita’s Keiwa College did an interesting study on “vocabulary preferences” among young Japanese speakers.

Although the prevalence of Western vocabulary words in Japanese may be shocking, it’s important to note that Japanese has, historically, been happy to borrow foreign words. Like I mentioned earlier, kanji are simply Chinese characters borrowed during the Han dynasty. Although a character in isolation will be pronounced using a native Japanese word (the 訓読み, kun’yomi, meaning “native reading”) compound words created out of kanji are read using the Japanese approximation of the original, Sino character’s sound (音読み, on’yomi). These characters are now a normal part of Japanese. Perhaps this legacy of borrowing has helped to make Japanese a “permeable” language, receptive to foreign words despite its phonetic limitations. Over time, these Chinese logographs have become a part of Japanese.

Now that the overwhelming majority of Japanese people are able to read and use the Roman alphabet, is it possible that our alphabet will integrate itself into formal Japanese the same way Han characters did? It already has it’s own name in Japanese: ローマ字, rōmaji, is itself a portmanteau of the Italian Roma, meaning “Rome,” and the Chinese “ji,” meaning “writing” or “character.” Perhaps in another 100 years, the Latin alphabet will have made its permanent mark on this especially receptive language.