Assimilation of English borrowings in Japanese

Abstract

This study provides a corpus-based analysis of English borrowings in Japanese with the focus on the assimilation processes which the borrowed items undergo. The corpus has been compiled by the author using a number of websites used by speakers of Japanese. The study shows that most of the borrowings undergo graphic and phonetic assimilation, such as vowel insertion and sound substitution. Grammatical and semantic assimilation are both less apparent and less frequent. Japanese uses a considerable number of borrowings from English, but as the examples discussed in this study, the borrowings often co-exist with their native equivalents and are used interchangeably.