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 Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

words originating from, or based on,

foreign-language A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in, a given country, and that native speakers from that country must usually acquire through conscious learning - be this through language lessons at school ...

(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 t ...

s derive from

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction;

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, 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'' 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 characte ...

; 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 In Japan, a is a salaried worker. In Japanese popular culture, this is embodied by a white-collar worker who shows overriding loyalty and commitment to the corporation where he works. Salarymen are expected to work long hours, to put in addit ...

", have nevertheless been borrowed into English together with their Japanese meanings. Japanese vocabulary also includes large numbers of words from

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

, 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). :''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 i ...

:UK =

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

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 In modern Japanese, principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to in Old Japanese. Conversely, also refers to kanji use ...

'', 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 of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone 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 are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb fo ...

(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