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Errors in the use of English in the Japanese linguistic landscape

Understanding how erroneous uses of English in Japan are often more than just careless mistakes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2015

Keith Barrs
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Extract

Foreign words which have been borrowed into the Japanese language, especially in the last few centuries, are commonly labelled as 外来語, gairaigo, meaning words (語, go) coming in (来, rai) from outside (外, gai). This umbrella term encompasses lexical items from numerous foreign languages, including Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, and English. As they undergo the borrowing process into the Japanese linguistic system, the words are likely to undergo modification, particularly in terms of their phonology, orthography, semantics, and syntax. The overwhelming majority of gairaigo have their roots in the English language; estimates put their number at around 10% of the Japanese lexicon (Daulton, 2008; Stanlaw, 2004). They include borrowings in the daily Japanese vocabulary (ニュース, nyūsu, news); ones used primarily in specialist fields, (コーパス, kōpasu, corpus), and others recorded in dictionaries but that play very little part in actual language usage (インディビデュアル, indibijyuaru, individual).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 30 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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