Loanwords in Japanese in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

Abstract Effects of globalization and of the modern exchanges among various countries are seen everywhere, and language does not escape them. Perhaps the most dynamic transformations are seen at the lexical level, where new loanwords are continually introduced. This paper aims to give a brief account of the peculiarities of loanwords in present-day Japanese, with a focus on their origin, degree of assimilation and semantic appropriateness – in the cases where loanwords have lost to a certain degree their original meaning. In the last section, the particular phenomenon of wasei-eigo, also known as ‘English made in Japan’, a derivation of the linguistic process of borrowing foreign words, is also discussed.

Keywords

• gairaigo
• ‘loanwords’
• ‘wasei-eigo’
• ‘pseudo-Anglicisms’
• lexical borrowings
• lexical innovations
• internationalization