Gairaigo is Japanese for " loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chine ...

'' are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language (generally Western) terms. These include ''

wasei-eigo are Japanese-language expressions based on English words, or parts of word combinations, that do not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived. Linguistics classifies them as pseudo-loanwords ...

'' (Japanese

pseudo-Anglicism A pseudo-anglicism is a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning. For example, English speakers traveling in France may be struck ...

s). Many of these

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because ...

s derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

' relationship with Japan amidst the isolationist policy of ''

sakoku was the isolationist foreign policy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate under which, for a period of 265 years during the Edo period (from 1603 to 1868), relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, and nearly a ...

'' during the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...

; and from French and German, due to France and Germany's cultural and scientific prominence during Japan's modernization in the

Meiji period The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...

. However, most come from English, the dominant world language today. Due to the large number of western concepts imported into Japanese culture during modern times, there are thousands of these English borrowings. These English words are informally referred to as having been "Nipponized". A few of them, such as " salaryman", have nevertheless been borrowed into English together with their Japanese meanings. Japanese vocabulary also includes large numbers of words from Chinese, borrowed at various points throughout history. However, since the Japanese language has such strong historical ties to the Chinese language, these loans are not generally considered ''gairaigo''. Many loanwords are in fact ''pseudo-borrowings'': despite their links to foreign language words, the word forms as used in modern Japanese are not used in the same way in their languages of origin. In fact, many such terms, despite their similarity to the original foreign words, are not easily understood by speakers of those languages (e.g. ''left over'' as a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for a later meal as in English—or ''famikon'' (, from "family computer"), which actually refers to the

Nintendo Entertainment System The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is an 8-bit third-generation home video game console produced by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan in 1983 as the commonly known as the The NES, a redesigned version, was released in America ...

). :''Note:'' :US =

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...

:UK =

British English British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadl ...

Examples

Due to the extent of Japanese borrowings, particularly from English, this list focuses mainly on pseudo-borrowings and commonly used loanwords from languages other than English (which are often mistaken for English words in Japan). Most loanwords (and all modern loans) are transcribed in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

, a Japanese syllabary. Older loans may be written using '' ateji'', with Kanji used to represent their phonetic readings without necessarily inheriting their meaning. In words composed of both a loan and native Japanese, the Japanese can function as a

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

within a compound (and would generally be written in Kanji if possible), or can be attached to the foreign word to inflect or otherwise modify it, as if it were okurigana (which is written in hiragana).

Notes

References

*Takashi Ichikawa, ''et al.'' (1998). , Tokyo, Japan: Sanseido Co., Ltd. .

External links

English Loan Words in Japanese
(Macmillan) {{DEFAULTSORT:Gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms Japanese vocabulary Society-related lists *

Examples

See also

Notes

References

External links