1. Introduction
Loanwords are abundant in Japanese (Bunka-cho, 1997, 1998, 1999; Kawasaki-shi, 1998; Shimane Prefecture, 1999; Shibata, 2002; Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyu-jo, 2003), and occupy almost 10% of a Japanese dictionary (Sanseido, 2003). There are even dictionaries only for loanwords, one of which contains roughly 45,000 words and 7,500 alphabet abbreviations (Sanseido, 2000). This does not include loanwords from Chinese origin, as these are now regarded as a part of Japanese language (Sanseido, 2003).
This massive amount of loanwords used in daily Japanese discourse is becoming controversial. Japanese researchers, organisations and government are conducting researches into the influences of loanwords on Japanese language, and seeking the best way for the future of their language (e.g. Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyu-jo, 2003). Their opinions vary, but most of them feel the need for some kind of policy on loanwords (see chapter 2.3.).
Despite these apprehensions, some teachers and learners of English think that loanwords are helpful for English vocabulary acquisition (e.g. Daulton, 1998; also see Appendix 5). There are negative opinions that loanwords hinder learners from acquiring accurate English (e.g. Asahi shinbun, 2000; also see Appendix 5), though, this large potential knowledge in L1 (Japanese) may be useful to teachers and learners.
This dissertation will examine the use and the usages of loanwords in Japanese and the government's and people's attitudes toward loanwords in chapter 1. A survey on the use of loanwords in a Japanese newspaper is described in chapter 2 along with a discussion of the possible effects English loanwords in Japanese may have on the acquisition of English by speakers of Japanese. Chapter 3 explains the questionnaire used in my research, and the results are produced in chapter 4. The questionnaire was conducted on 50 subjects in order to examine the influence of loanwords on English learning and reassure attitudes to the use of loanwords and Japanese English. The final chapter suggests implications of loanwords for teaching and learning English vocabularies.
2. Loanwords in Japan
“We should abstain from massive use of loanwords.” (Yomiuri Shinbun, 2003)
“Loanwords enrich Japanese language with new concepts.” (Bunka-cho, 1997)
“Loanwords are a bad influence on Japanese language.” (Asahi Shinbun, 2000)
“It is natural that language changes in this world of globalisation.” (Appendix 5)
These sentences are often seen or heard in recent years in Japan, and there is no 'correct answer' to this problem. This section will look at how loanwords are used in Japanese language.
2.1. Loanwords in Japan
2.1.1. Previous researches
There is a large quantity of loanwords being in Japan in these days. (Bunka-cho, 1998, 1999; Shibata (NHK), 2002). There is no conclusive data about the number of loanwords in Japanese, however, roughly 6 thousand of the 62 thousand words in Sanseido Kokugo Jiten (Sanseido's Japanese Dictionary) (2nd ed.) are loanwords (Sanseido, 2003). In the loanword dictionary, Konsaisu Katakanago Jiten (Sanseido's Concise Dictionary of Katakana Words) (2nd ed.) (2000), 45,000 loanwords and further 7,500 alphabet abbreviations are registered. These numbers show how much loanwords are in Japanese language now.
However, the number of words doesn't directly reflect the frequency of loanwords. Bunka-cho's (1997a) research into the words in 90 magazines shows loanwords occupied 9.7% of vocabulary types and 2.9% of vocabulary tokens. However, this research was conducted in 1956, 47 years ago. During WWII, loanwords were banned, as were Japanese words that negatively described Japanese society. Therefore after WWII, as a strong reaction to it, many loanwords came into Japanese along with new products and concepts. Accordingly, the situation of loanwords has changed dramatically in these 50 years, so Bunka-cho's (1997a) data is no longer current.
In 1998, Bunka-cho (1998) published an investigation of vocabularies in spoken TV language. The research examined all the spoken data from all 6 broadcasting stations between April to June in 1989. According to this research, loanwords accounted for 3.5% of word types and 3.1% of tokens except for commercials. Though blended words were counted separately, this number still shows that the loanword percentage is not as high as people seem to feel. This is perhaps because there are many loanwords in TV commercials: 15.7% of word types and 16.8% of tokens, which is almost the same figure for Japanese words of Chinese origin (Bunka-cho, 1998).
2.1.2. Loanwords in the newspaper
In looking at the current use of loanwords in written Japanese, I conducted research on newspapers. The newspaper I analysed is the Asahi Shinbun (Asahi Newspaper) (2003), the biggest-selling Japanese newspapers; the data covers 30 days from 1st to 31st January (2nd January was a press holiday). I chose 3 sections for the analysis: editorial, first page of the economy section, and the TV section. Proper nouns such as names of people, music, movies, places, constructions, companies, organisations, currencies and treaties are not counted, and words in tables and charts are not counted, either. Loanwords from Chinese and Korean are also not counted because they are close to Japanese, and it is sometimes not clear whether they are loanwords or not. Japanese English words are counted as loanwords in this analysis. Compound nouns are counted as 1 word when one or more words have no separate meaning (E.g. nihon-jin (=Japanese person) → nihon (=Japan ○) + jin (=no meaning ×), and counted as 2 words when all of the words have independent meaning (E.g. nihon-keizai (=Japanese economy) → nihon (=Japan ○) + keizai (=economy ○)).
The summary of the data is shown in table 1. (for a list of the vocabulary, see Appendix 2) 'The number of types' means the number of loanword types, and 'the total number of tokens' means the number of separate loanwords. For example in English sentence, “she looked very happy, though she had very bad accident”, there are 8 types and 10 tokens in total. The type-token ratio shows a higher level of lexical variety in terms of loanwords in Economy and TV than in Editorials.
| Section | Number of types |
Agerage types per day |
Total number of tokens |
Average tokens per day |
Type-token ratio |
| Editorial | 205 | 6.83 | 386 | 12.87 | 188.43 |
| Economy | 524 | 17.47 | 2939 | 97.97 | 560.79 |
| TV | 1155 | 38.50 | 7180 | 239.33 | 621.65 |
The proportion of loanwords is also very different. I counted the total word tokens and the loanword tokens in each section for the first 10 days. Table 2 shows the results.
| Section | Total word tokens over 10 days |
Total loanword tokens over 10 days |
Loanword percentage |
| Editorial | 5659 | 176 | 3.11% |
| Economy | 12708 | 730 | 5.74% |
| TV | 14422 | 2136 | 14.81% |
The loanword proportions are substantially different in each section, perhaps because the different sections use different styles and tones of language. In editorials, we see opinions or suggestions. As these should be 'proper Japanese', writers tend to use loanwords only when they are necessary. However, as topics in the economy section are more technical, more loanwords appear, firstly because, in technical discourse, newly imported concepts are often called by their original names, which become loanwords, and secondly, in the same discourse, some people try to show that they are the intelligentsia by using difficult technical terms, which is loaned from foreign languages, mainly from English (Bunka-cho, 1997a; Shibata (NHK), 2002). Finally, the TV section contains many loanwords, which may because the language in this section is casual, and closer to spoken language. Therefore, this percentage (14.81%) is close to the use of loanwords in commercials (Bunka-cho, 1998).
2.2. Japanese Writing System, Pronunciation for Loanwords and Loanword Modifications
2.2.1. Writing system
There are four types of characters in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, kanji (Chinese characters) and romaji. Romaji means the Roman alphabet, which can be seen in Appendix 1. Romaji is used in limited contexts, such as advertisements and signs, so that sometimes it is not treated as a type of character in Japanese. (Banno et al. , 1999)
Hiragana and katakana derive from kanji, which was imported with sutras from China in A.D. 4.1 Both hiragana and katakana are syllabic letters, while kanji originally were ideograms, though, Japanese people also used them as phonograms using their pronunciation2 (Kono, 1997a). The running hand type of this phonogram became hiragana, which achieved its modern form in the 9th century. Katakana, on the other hand, was made from a part of kanji in order to show how to read kanji in the 8th century, and achieved its modern form in the 12th century (Heibon-sha, 1999; Kodan-sha, 2000). Katakana was used primarily for notation of the pronunciation of Chinese characters, however, it changed its purpose after WWII; it is used mainly for onomatopoeias and loanwords at present3 (Gakken, 1999).
Kanji, hiragana and katakana can be blended in one sentence. For example, 「私はレストランでステーキを食べた。」 (I ate stake at a restaurant.) is constructed in the following way. In the sentence, hiragana are not underlined, kanji are underlined (solid), and katakana are indicated with dotted underlines.
| 私 | は | レストラン | で | ステーキ | を | 食べた | |
| I | particle | restaurant | particle | steak | particle | ate | |
| kanji | hiragana | katakana | hiragana | katakana | hiragana | kanji+hiragana |
2.2.2. Pronunciation
There are basic 50 sounds and other sounds derived from them: voiced consonants, explosives, palatalised sounds, and some other sounds. These derivations are described as a combination of the basic 50 sounds or the basic 50 sounds with diacritical marks on the right top corners of each letter. One syllable consists of a single vowel or one consonant + one vowel pair, and there is no combination of more than two consonants. One of the exceptions is 'n', which can be one syllable, and the other is palatalised sounds, which have two consonants in romaji (see Appendix 1), however, they are also dealt as consonant-vowel pairs according to its pronunciation (Kodan-sha International, 2000).
As seen in Appendix 1, there are 27 sounds listed only in the katakana section. They are the imported sounds, which didn't exist in traditional Japanese language, therefore, Japanese people created new combinations of katakana to describe similar sounds to the original (JeKai, 2000). Since this is relatively new and these combinations are still not stable, there may be some more combinations than I have listed. This problem of instability will be discussed in the next section.
When a word is loaned, its pronunciation is adjusted to the phonological system of the local language, which is called rephonalisation. Bunka-cho (1997a: 18) categorised the major types of rephonalisation as follows:
1. When a succession of different consonants appears, insert a vowel between them.
Add a vowel at the end when the word finishes with a consonant.
E.g. /script/ - /su /ku /ri /pu /to /
2. Insert double consonants between a short vowel and a consonant.
E.g. /step/ - /su /te /p /pu /
3. Group some different sounds as one sound.
a. Choose one of the 5 vowels, which is the most similar to the original sound.
E.g. fur, far - fa:
b. Pronounce /o:/ and /ou/ as /o:/.
E.g. ball, bowl - bo:ru
c. Pronounce /s/ and /θ/ as /s/ line, and /z/, /j/ and /d/ as /z/ line.4
(c.f. Appendix 1: 50 sound table)
E.g. thick, sick - shikku (same as 'chic', too)
zigzag / jigsaw - jiguzagu / jiguso:
d. Pronounce /b/ and /v/ as /b/.
E.g. bolt, volt - boruto
e. Pronounce /r/ and /l/ as /l/.
(However, the written form is 'r'. See the discussion below.)
E.g. right, light - raito
f. Pronounce /n/ and /m/ as /n/ when they are not followed by vowels.
E.g. stand / stamp - stando / stanpu
4. Make a similar alternative Japanese sound, which didn't exist.
E.g. tea - ti:, fashon - fasshon , shaver - she:ba:
Rephonalisation always happens, but as loanwords themselves are extraneous, the rule is complicated and not as stable as traditional Japanese. Accordingly, sometimes pronunciation differs among individuals. This problem will be treated in chapter 2.3. together with the problem of instability of transcription.
In writing Japanese words with alphabets, I used some conventions. Firstly, all the Japanese words are written in italics. Secondly, I transcribed a mark 'ー' describing a long sound as ':'. (By the way, this mark is used only with katakana words.) For example,「カード」(card) is transcribed as ka:do . Thirdly, double or long consonants are described with small 'tsu' in Japanese, which are transcribed as double consonants as English 'pepper'. For example, 「カップ」(cup) is transcribed as kappu .
When English basewords are rephonalised, they have more syllables because phonetically due to Japanese syllable structure (single vowel, consonant + vowel, or 'n'). For example, 'strike' has one syllable in English, but loanwords su /to /ra /i /ku and su /to /ra /i /ki (both derives from 'strike' but have differently narrowed semantic fields) have 5 syllables. Moreover, due to the Japanese writing system, long vowels are counted as 2 syllables. Therefore, 'percent', which has 2 syllables, becomes pa /: /se /n /to with 5 syllables, and 'escalate', which consists of 3 syllables, becomes e /su /ka /re /: /to , which has 6 syllables. The large number of syllables is a potential explanation for the frequent occurrence of truncation.
Another point that should be noted is about 'r' sound in Japanese. I transcribed 「ら・り・る・れ・ろ」as ra / ri / ru / re / ro, following the standard rule for romaji, however, it doesn't transcribe the correct pronunciation. Japanese 'r' sound is closer to English 'l' than 'r' sound. The followings are the examples of similar English pronunciation (British English), which correspond to Japanese 'r' sounds.
・Rainen (next year): language, platinum
・Ringo (apple): calligraphy, liquid
・Rusu (absence): fluent, luminary (* same sound but shorter)
・Rekishi (history): plebiscite, lecture
・Rokuon (recording): loiter, long
2.2.3. Modifications
When loanwords are used in Japanese, they are modified in some ways due to the difference of grammar, writing system and pronunciation. As rephonalisation occurs to all the loanwords, it is not included in the classification. One word can possess more than two of these criteria.
Figure 1. Classification of Loanwords / Japanese English
The three categories of shifted loanwords above were defined by Daulton (1998: 2). He explained that “English loanwords in Japanese are different in form [truncation, rephonalisation], function [speech part modification], and/or meaning [semantic modification] from their English basewords.” (my brackets) In his view, all the loanwords are shifted in some way to some extent, but in my research, as I excluded rephonalisation, I include “pure loanwords”, which are not shifted in form, function or meaning but only different in pronunciation. Bunka-cho (The Agency of Cultural Affairs) (1997) also explained these modifications in detail. The definitions and details of each category are as follows:
Loanword (Pure): English loanword in Japanese, which is not shifted in form, function or meaning. For example, sa:bisu is from 'service', jirenma is from 'dilemma', neither words show change in semantic field or speech part. They are also not shortened.
Loanword (Shifted: Truncation): English loanword in Japanese, which is shortened from the original English baseword. For example, the English baseword of rihabiri is 'rehabilitation'. However, truncation does not always happen as rihabilite:shon can be used instead of rihabiri . Shortening tends to happen in informal contexts, and unshortened words are preferred in formal situations. Sometimes only truncation is used, for example, nega is derived from 'negative (film)', and negatibu doesn't refer to negative film, but instead refers to a way of thinking. In this case, nega and negatibu are two separate words as they have different semantic fields, though negatibu is also used for negative film among photographers. Another feature of truncation is that shortening involves using the first few syllables, so that shortened loanwords sometimes stand for some different English basewords. For example, nabi stands for at least 3 different English basewords, 'car navigation system' (ca: nabi ), 'navigator' (nabige:ta: ) and 'navigate' (nabi suru ).
Loanword (Shifted: Speech part modification): English loanword in Japanese, which is used as a different speech part from its baseword. Bunka-cho (The Agency of Cultural Affairs) (1997) explained that a word followed by a verb suru is a noun. For example, arenji suru is /noun + verb/, so that arenji (arrange) here is a noun. In fact, arenji can be used as a subject of a sentence, which shows that the speech part is completely modified. Other similar examples are sa:bu suru (=to serve a ball), sutoppu suru (=to stop) and anaunsu suru (=to announce). However, in Daulton's (1998) theory, arenji suru is a single verb. In his view, a lot of nouns, such as 'make up', turn into verbs me:ku suru . ('Up' is omitted.) In my word selection and analysis, I take bunka-cho's theory since they are the authorities of Japanese language studies.
Though speech part modification is common with the verb suru , there are other forms. For example, English nouns are sometimes used as adjectival nouns with da or na at the end, such as shokku (shock) na (=shocking). Da and na are the ending forms of adjectival nouns, which are semantically adjectives but their conjugation types are the same as verbs (Tsujimura, 1996; Iori et al. , 2000). English adverbs are also used as adjectival nouns, such as abauto (about) na (=rough, general). In these speech part modifications, English words are imported and modified in order to adjust them to Japanese grammar. However, there are some words that are completely Japanised grammatically, such as panikuru (=to panic), daburu (=to overlap, derived from 'double') and takuru (=to take a taxi). uru at the end of each loanword above is one of the ending forms of verb. They are regularly conjugated verbs.
Finally, there are some special cases observed in my data. For example, ahuta: faibu (after five) is one noun, which means time after work or private time. Similarly, onri: wan (only one) is a single word, which means the best partner or a person (occasionally non-human) who is unique or special.
Loanword (Shifted: Semantic modification): English loanword in Japanese, whose semantic field is not the same as its English baseword. There are four types of semantic shift: 1) complete shift of meaning, 2) semantic narrowing, 3) semantic broadening and 4) combination of narrowing and broadening.
Examples of the complete shift from my data are manshon (mansion) and gyara (guarantee). Manshon in Japanese refers to high quality apartment, and apa:to (apartment) is cheaper and of lower quality than manshon . Gyara is an honorarium for celebrities, which is completely shifted meaning.
Semantic narrowing is the most common type of semantic shift (Bunka-cho, 1997), where only one of the meanings of an English baseword is borrowed as a loanword. In this case, a semantic field of a loanword is narrowed and strictly limited. For example, atorakushon (attraction) only refers to a ride at theme parks but not to physical attraction between people.
Semantic broadening is not as common as semantic narrowing, and I couldn't observe any instance in my data, however, Bunka-cho (1997) gives a good example, wai shatsu (white shirt). Wai shatsu means shirt in Japanese. Wai derivers from 'white'; however, as 'white' is usually pronounced as howaito as a loanword, most people don't realise that wai shatsu is derived from 'white shirt'. Therefore, a blue shirt is described as 'aoi (blue) wai shatsu (white shirt)' in Japanese.
The last type of semantic modification is a combination of narrowing and broadening, which is also not very common. Bunka-cho's (1997) example is sutairisuto (stylist), the baseword meaning being 'a person who arranges design, people's hair or fashion' and 'a person who develops good style of writing' (Longman Advanced American Dictionary, 2002). Sutairisuto refers only to the first meaning but not to the second, therefore in this sense, the semantic field is narrowed. However, sutairisuto also means 'a person who care about his/her appearance or fashion', which is a broadened meaning.
Japanese English: a word created by Japanese people using English words. These words are usually well established in Japanese, and people use them frequently, but often without noticing that they are Japanese English, not loanwords. Some of them have relatively transparent meaning, while some are very difficult for English speakers to understand. For example, OL (o: eru , which stands for ofisu redi: ), which is from 'office + lady' and means a female office worker, has conjecturable meaning, while purasu arufa ('plus + alpha'), which refers to something extra, is a bewildering phrase for English speaking people.
2.3. People's Attitudes towards Loanwords
Loanwords have many advantages and disadvantages, so that there are a range of opinions on loanwords from loanword-phile to loanword-phobe. Most Japanese people's opinions are somewhere between the poles, which shows that people are still groping for the way their language goes. It is not only about the people, but also the government that is not sure what to do with loanwords. The government started to reinvestigate the proper usage of loanwords in 2002, in response to the criticism on the usage of loanwords in official documents and the growing concern over the usage of loanwords in general (Shimane Prefecture, 1999; Kawasaki-shi (webpage); Yomiuri Shinbun, 2003). The National Institute for Japanese Language established a 'loanword' commission in 2002, which is now publishing proposals for the paraphrase of loanwords in Japanese equivalent every 6 months.
People's attitudes to the general use of loanwords are more diverse: 'they are difficult to understand', 'we cannot guess the meaning from their written form (nor pronunciation)', 'we can express subtle meaning using loanwords and traditional Japanese words separately', 'they can create modern image' (Binka-cho, 1997a). The followings are researches and theoretical backgrounds of the pros and cons on loanwords.
2.3.1. Cons
One of the most major criticisms of loanwords is that they are fully understood by neither speakers/writers nor listeners/readers. According to the survey of 139 citizens about the understanding of 591 loanwords, conducted by Kawasaki-shi (1998), only 2.4% of subjects could understand more than 90%, 7.2% understood 80~90%, and 17.6% understood 70~80%. Although the selected words had normally been used in official documents without any annotation in this city, this questionnaire disclosed that only 27.2% of the subjects could understand more than 70% of the loanwords. Bunka-cho (1997b) conducted research into the rate of recognition, understanding and use of 120 loanwords, on 2200 Japanese people aged 16 years old or more. The most recognised word was sutoresu (stress), which was recognised by 97.4%, understood by 92.6%, and used by 90.6% of the subjects. The 10 best and 10 worst understood loanwords are as table 3.
Watts (2003) noted this research in his article in the Guardian on 21 June 2003, and mentioned that sutoresu is recognised so well because of Japanese people's hard working habits. In addition, sutoresu was recognised by 98.7% of subjects of a similar survey that Bunka-cho conducted in 1999.
| Rank | Loanword | Recognition | Understanding | Use |
| 1 | sutoresu (stress) | 97.4 | 92.6 | 90.6 |
| 2 | risaikuru (recycle) | 97.1 | 91.1 | 87.0 |
| 3 | borantia (volunteer) | 97.2 | 90.8 | 86.2 |
| 4 | te:ma (theme) | 96.8 | 88.2 | 80.1 |
| 5 | rekurie:shon (recreation) | 94.9 | 87.7 | 80.8 |
| 6 | sanpuru (sample) | 96.0 | 87.5 | 78.7 |
| 7 | ri:da:shippu (leadership) | 94.2 | 85.1 | 68.8 |
| 8 | sutahhu (staff) | 93.4 | 83.4 | 70.9 |
| 9 | huru taimu (full time) | 90.7 | 82.7 | 67.1 |
| 10 | ho:mu pe:ji (home page) | 93.8 | 82.6 | 67.5 |
| 111 | bakku ofisu (back office) | 18.1 | 7.8 | 3.4 |
| 112 | gabanansu (governance) | 17.3 | 6.8 | 2.9 |
| 113 | riterashi: (literacy) | 10.7 | 6.3 | 3.9 |
| 114 | tore:sabiliti (traceability) | 8.0 | 6.1 | 3.9 |
| 115 | enpawa:mento (empowerment) | 11.3 | 5.7 | 3.0 |
| 116 | mesena (mecenat) | 15.5 | 5.7 | 3.0 |
| 117 | tasukufo:su (task force) | 10.4 | 4.9 | 3.6 |
| 118 | konso:shiamu (consortium) | 10.4 | 4.1 | 1.3 |
| 119 | enfo:sumento (enforcement) | 7.9 | 3.4 | 2.3 |
| 120 | inkyube:shon (incubation) | 10.0 | 3.3 | 2.0 |
| (From Bunka-cho, 1997b) |
Another problem with loanwords is instability of their writing and pronunciation system (The Chunichi Shimbun, 1995; Bunka-cho, 1997a; Asahi Shinbun, 2000). As loanwords contain new phonological elements, their pronunciations are adjusted to the Japanese pronunciation system, but at the same time, the Japanese writing system is adjusted to the new elements, too. Some new combinations of katakana are being created to transcribe foreign sounds (See chapter 2.2.1 & 2.2.2), however, they are still not fixed as a rule. Accordingly, sometimes there are some different forms for one loanword, which makes it fairly confusing and instable.
Truncation is taken as a problem of loanwords by Suzuki (1975) and Asahi Shinbun (2000), though, since it also often occurs with Japanese traditional words and words of Chinese origin (Jinouchi, 1998), it cannot be taken as 'a problem of loanwords'. Other problems Suzuki also listed are homonyms and divergence. He claimed that there are many homonymous loanwords, whose basewords are different. It happens due to the difference of the pronunciation systems. Divergence happens when the same word is loaned twice in different times, different situations, or from different languages. When the second meaning of a word is imported, the 'new' meaning will be simply added if it is pronounced as the same as the existing one. However, if the word is given different pronunciation from the existing one due to the instability of pronunciation, the second meaning will be taken as a new word. Asahi Shinbun mentioned that it is a problem that loanwords are difficult for foreign people to understand because of shifted pronunciation and meaning, while Japanese words of Chinese origin are more understandable for the people who know Chinese characters.
2.3.2. Pros
Although there are many negative effects of loanwords, the majority of Japanese people still support loanwords (Shibata, 2002). Jinnouchi (1998) pointed out that Japanese people are in favour of 'new' and 'soft' things. Obviously, loanwords are relatively newer than traditional Japanese. Moreover, new loanwords are being borrowed every day. What he meant by 'soft' is that Japanese people can avoid using negative words directly in communicating with others by using loanwords, which soften the negative feeling on the topic. For example, shakkin (debt) is a Chinese-derived Japanese word, which is now often replaced by ro:n (loan) because ro:n sounds not negative for Japanese people, while shakkin means directly 'debt' and this word is accompanied by negative connotations.
Kanaya (1996), who is a vice-president of CAJLE (Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education), explained 4 reasons for loanwords' not being able to invade Japanese language. His reasons are: immunity systems of (1) speech part, (2) fundamental vocabularies, (3) transcription, and (4) pronunciation. Firstly, most loanwords are nouns. They are often used as adverbs and adjectival nouns, but with the help of Japanese particles to adjust them to Japanese grammar (Arthy, 2001). For example, 'smoothly' becomes sumu:zu ni (adverb) and 'poweful' becomes pawahuru na (adjectival nouns). Some loanwords succeeded in establishing their position as conjugatable verbs or adjectives, such as daburu 5 (doub
Secondly, he stated that most fundamental vocabularies are Japanese traditional words. The fundamental vocabularies are the words that are used the most frequently in daily life, such as 'head', 'hand', 'talk', walk', 'up', 'side'. Even Japanese words of Chinese origin are few, and there are almost no other loanwords in this category. These words are not distinctive in the discourse, however, they are fundamentally important.
Next, he pointed out that transcription itself is an obstacle for loanwords to invade Japanese language. There are limitations for loanwords to penetrate into Japanese, because they are written in katakana. Although loanwords are used frequently, Japanese people still don't allow them to come into hiragana and kanji. I think the reason is one of Japanese people's characteristics: uchi wa uchi, soto wa soto (inside is inside, outside is outside), which means that 'outside' elements are rarely integrated into the 'inside' culture. Because of this sense of 'outsiderness' (Dale, 1986), loanwords are still not written in hiragana, and not usually treated in the same way as Japanese traditional words.
Finally, Kanaya mentioned the pronunciations of loanwords. He insisted that loanwords are already absorbed and become part of the Japanese language, which is not harmful for Japanese, but enriches Japanese language. When a Japanese person pronounces loanwords in the English way, many people will think he is affected and dislike him, because the words are already 'English' for them because of their pronunciation (Quackenbush, 1974; Kanaya, 1996). It means the loanwords should be pronounced in the Japanese way, not in original the English way.
2.3.3. Changes of people's attitudes
In this way, there are opinions and researches on loanwords, however, these pros and cons are watching different dimensions of the problems of loanwords. People who support loanwords are looking at their linguistic features and values, while people who oppose to loanwords are taking more practical stances. According to Bunka-cho's (1999) research, young people feel comfortable with new loanwords and use them in daily life, while older generations are more conservative about loanwords. Therefore, some people say that massive numbers of loanwords will come into Japanese in the future, however, Jinnouchi (1998) pointed out that generally people become conservative to new elements at the age of around 25, so that the young loanword supporters now will be on the opposite side in 50 years.
NHK's research (Shibata, 2002) shows the recent change of people's attitudes to loanwords and Japanese English, that people generally have more critical opinions about loanwords and Japanese English than they did 14 years before. On the one hand, the number of loanwords is increasing sharply, and on the other hand, people's attitudes towards loanwords are becoming critical. There is still no clear view about the future of loanwords in Japanese because of this imbalance.
NOTES: