Even though it is a mostly homogenous country, Japan has not remained immune to various outside influences over the years. Through trading, the expansion of knowledge, and technology, the Japanese language has come in contact with several nations and has been impacted by Asian and Western influences --- namely the influences of China and English-speaking countries.
The extent of borrowing from different languages into Japanese correlates to the amount of contact that it has had with those speakers. Borrowings are clearly marked using the Japanese character system of katakana. Unlike western contact, the intense contact between Japanese and Chinese centuries ago caused a great deal of the Japanese language to have Chinese origins until relations between the two led to a divergence in the development of Japanese.
The Japanese writing system is composed of a considerable amount of borrowing with a special character system for loans (katakana) and the kanji system of characters and radicals an adoption from China at the end of the 4th century (Japan’s first writing system). Because of the social dynamic in early Japanese history, the integration of the Chinese writing system into Japanese culture resulted in a written diglossia.
Starting in the Heian period, Chinese characters were initially used for record and religious texts. Chinese became a “High” language, signaling prestige and education. These loans made up around 47.5% of the Japanese language, outnumbering native Japanese words by 10.8%. Chinese has a superstratum relationship with Japanese. Compared to China’s impact, that of other Asian countries pales severely. Loveday specifically speaks of the indigenous Ainu who, while native to Japan, have had only a handful of their words borrowed.
For a time, the Dutch were Japan’s most intense western contact. Even though contact was mainly commercial, the Dutch language infiltrated Japan’s academic terminology. It was spoken by official, authorized interpreter families and considered the language of diplomacy. Many Dutch loanwords are pure or truncated, reflecting their commercial relationship with the Japanese. Other western influences include Portuguese, Spanish, and French. However, no Western language would surpass Dutch until 1870 when English became the language of diplomacy in Japan (Loveday).
Loveday considers the impact of English almost as significant as that of Chinese with at least half of its borrowings coming from English. The original purpose for borrowing from Japanese was for access to understand more about concepts created in western nations and not necessarily for dialogue. Over time, Japanese has acquired more “Westerness”. English functions as decorative, stylistic, and a symbol of modernity and a world lingua franca (Loveday). Oral and visual transmission through mass media contributed greatly to the number of English loans (Winford, 2003).
On page 27 of Loveday’s Explorations in Japanese Sociolinguistics, he postulates that Anglo-Japanese has expanded to include Relexification, Language Change, various forms of Nativization (e.g. semantic change, pseudo-English innovation, truncated compounds, acronyming, and hybridization), and Stylistic Experimentation. There are also some cases of structural adaptation such as combining English loan words with flexible native verb stems (e.g. the English loan enjoi and the native stem -suru ‘to do’ combine to make enjoisuru ‘to enjoy’) suggesting slightly more intense contact (Winford, 2003).
However, compared to Chinese, English is not so dominating in Japan. Since Chinese infiltrated the Japanese language at a time when it had no writing system of its own, Chinese borrowing is far more intense. It filled linguistics gaps, making China’s influence in Japan significant to Japan’s foundation. Also during this time of borrowing from Chinese, the language was used almost exclusively for “High” functions in Japanese society. The influence of the English language simply replaced Japan’s original pipeline to Westerness.
Although, it has expanded beyond that hemisphere. English can be seen and heard strewn about Japanese pop culture and advertisements, meaning that unlike Chinese, English has not been secluded to the elite or certain circumstances. This intermixing of functions dilutes the possibility of English being a superstratum influence. On the other hand, those cases of structural borrowing could signify a growing convergence or bilingualism.
References
Loveday, Leo J. 1996. Language in Contact in Japan: A Socio-linguistic History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Loveday, Leo J. 1986. Explorations in Japanese sociolinguistics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Winford, Donald. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
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