Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien
"Introduction to Historical Linguistics"
WS 2003/2004

Coursework

- The English Influence on the Japanese Language -
Borrowing as a Trend

Date: 20th August 2004

Table of Contents

I Introduction to Borrowing page 01

II The Japanese Language in Contact page 13

III Integrating Borrowings into Japanese page 24

IV Final Remark page 34

V References page 37

VI Appendices page 38

Introduction

Languages have always been in contact with other languages. Much has been written about language contact among Indo-European languages. Thus, this paper aims to shed some light in the direction of a so-called exotic language: Japanese. For many it is still a language considered to be unaffected by outer influences due to its grammatical complexity and geographical origin. But quite the opposite is the case. Japanese culture and language comprise an abundance of English or foreign expressions respectively which gives rise to take a closer look, first of all what borrowing means in theory, and then how this can be applied on the subject of Japanese borrowings in particular, in terms of how much is borrowed, especially from the English language, and how the borrowings are integrated into the native Japanese language system.

Chapter I – Introduction to Borrowing

Nowadays and throughout history languages have always had contact with other languages. The degree and type of contact among the languages may vary, however. Winford (2003) sees three broad kinds of contact situations: language maintenance, language shift and creation of new contact languages. Assigning a contact situation to one or the other type is difficult because every contact situation is different.

Language maintenance means the preservation by a speech community of its native language from generation to generation, and the influence on the lexicon and structure of a group′s native language from external language with which it is in contact is referred to as ′borrowing′ (Winford 2003:12). The term ′borrowing′, however, is misleading, because the borrowed terms are not literally borrowed, since the words stay with and belong to the vocabulary of the donor language. Moreover, the language borrowing the words does not give back the ′borrowed′ items, it is not intended at least, although by sheer coincidence words may return - even in a different shape - to the donor language, as it occurred to the word ′sport′, that came into French via English, which had taken the ancestor of the word from French (Hock 1996:254). The agents of change are the language′s native speakers, in which case the borrowing language is the recipient language and the donor language is the source language. The borrowing process may vary in degree and kind from heavy to lexical borrowing, from slight to more or less significant incorporation of structural features as well. Lexical borrowing, that means borrowing of content morphemes like nouns or verbs, is extremely common. Structural borrowings on the other hand, that means borrowing features in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics are rarer, though can be found as well (Winford 2003:12). Borrowing mostly takes place in situation of structural convergence. That often happens where languages are spoken in close geographical proximity, like border areas or communities characterized by a high degree of multilingualism. A good example for that are ′Sprachbünde′, like the Balkan Sprachbund, where a significant diffusion of structural features of Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Macedonien for instance is prevalent (Winford 2003:13). Code-switching situations are also part of the language maintenance situations. These involve alternate use of two languages within the same stretch of speech and often even within the same sentence.

Language shift may take place between different linguistic groups, mostly when these groups encounter in a permanent contact situation. In such a case, one of the group′s native languages will partially or even totally be abandoned in favour for another, as it predominantly happens to immigration groups coming to the United States, which by the third generation succeed in achieving native proficiency in American English (Winford 2003:15). The third kind of contact settings are dealing with bilingual mixed languages, often referred to as pidgins or creoles. These contact situations often have extreme outcomes, since they, put simplistically, take the vocabulary of one source and fuse it with the grammar of the other source. An example for that is the Media Lengua of Ecuador, a language which incorporates Spanish lexicon into a virtually unchanged Quechua grammatical framework (Winford 2003:19).

There are different factors that determine the varied outcomes of languages in contact. Up till now, only structural linguistic constraints have been mentioned as primary determinants of contact-induced change. There are extralinguistic factors like social contexts, however, that make it possible that virtually any linguistic feature can be transferred from one language to another – if the social circumstances are right. Winford (2003:26) discusses a spectrum introduced by Loveday, that sees a relatively homogeneous community of monolinguists on one end of the spectrum, most of whom have little or no contact with a foreign language, like the Japanese or the Russian. Borrowing in that case is mostly reduced to lexical borrowings that enter the receiving language via the mass media or travelling individuals for instance. In the middle of the spectrum we find situations involving varying degrees of bi- or multilingualism within the community.

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