To me Japanese is a very fun language to learn, but there’s a particular element of its recent evolution that I really don’t care for. Read on to find out what I mean.
The World Cup is here at last, which means the soccer frenzy that has really gripped Japan for the past several years is at a peak. Although once known as a country devoted to baseball, Japan has thrown its energy and mass attention into European football. The result is that on any given weekend (and on most weekdays) you can go to the Sports Park and find a myriad of pick-up soccer matches, but absolutely no baseball games outside of the actual baseball diamond. A soccer club in a Japanese high school these days confers comparatively the same rank on its members as a football team in your typical American high school (particularly those in the South). Baseball is still popular, but soccer is cool, fresh, and trendy—three things that are guaranteed to get Japan’s attention.
So how does this relate to the Japanese language? Anytime something new is introduced into Japan, new vocabulary must be created. Japanese has the potential to be a strong language for importing new words using existing constructions, similar to the building blocks used to construct words in English. But this potential is vastly underutilized in favor of the quick and easy way to get new words in Japanese: loanwords. A loanword is a word taken from a foreign language (almost always English) and pronounced in a Japanese manner. (Since Japanese has a relatively limited set of sounds—five vowels and fewer consonants than English—the Japanese version of the word often sounds very different when compared to the English version.) The mass use of loanwords in recent years has given rise to such terms as:
The list goes on and on and expands every year. For things relating to soccer, the loanword percentage is noticeably high. English words such as shoot, pass, space, defense line, offside, kickoff, foul, and more have been taken straight into Japanese and riddle the vocabulary of the Japanese commentators. At times it seems like you can understand what the commentators are saying without knowing any of the Japanese surrounding the loanwords (if you speak English, that is).
The advantage of loanwords is that it gets new vocabulary into the language quickly and it prevents homophone bloat (the introduction of many words with the same pronunciation), which can be a big problem with Japanese’s limited collection of phonemes. But what I dislike (loathe, almost) about loanwords is the rampant adoption of new words without (it seems) any consideration for whether a suitable word already exists in the language. Take “space” for example. In a soccer context it just refers to an open area. Japanese has a perfect word for this—kuukan—constructed from the character meaning “empty” and the character meaning “interval”. Both the word and its characters are common—the characters in particular, as these two are learned in the first two years of elementary school. But when talking about space in soccer, it was apparently decided that the loanward “supeesu” was a better choice.
The end result is that not only do you have to learn all of the characters (and thus linguistic building blocks) in Japanese, you also have to learn the definition and proper uses of each loanword. If you’re coming from an English-speaking background you’ll have an easier time at the latter, because typically every loanword comes from English these days. However, speakers of other languages (such as Chinese and Koreans, two of Japan’s largest minorities), can’t draw on an English vocabulary when decoding loanwords, and without the standard set of linguistic constructions provided by Japanese characters they are consigned to rote memorization of each new word.
This, I believe, is not how a language should evolve. In effect, Japanese is becoming schizophrenic, with the set of words built with Japanese constructions on one side and the set of words imported from outside languages on the other. If I had my way I would lead a massive restructuring effort to remove the superfluous loanwords from the Japanese vocabulary, but given the unstoppable spread of loanwords (not to mention their attention-grabbing power both phonetically and visually), such an effort seems unlikely to succeed anywhere. So I will resign myself to ranting about the issue in such stages as this.
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far—I tend to get carried away when I talk about Japanese, since it’s one of my favorite topics. If you have questions or comments feel free to use the form below.