Englishization of Japanese and acculturation of English to Japanese culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper first discusses Englishization of Japanese, focusing on the use of English borrowings in newspaper editorials. Unlike advertising texts (Takashi, 1990) and modern literature (Ono, 1992), newspaper editorials do not exploit the considerable variation in the knowledge of English among the Japanese. Rather, they cope with the variation by using mainly established borrowings and by adding glosses to nonce borrowings in order to maintain the intelligibility. Second, this paper discusses acculturation of English to Japanese culture by comparing the descriptions of things peculiar to Japan in two Japanese‐English dictionaries, whose publication dates are sixteen years apart. The sharp contrast between the two dictionaries indicates the change in the Japanese people's attitude toward English and the increasing awareness among lexicographers of the fact that they should not resign themselves to simply giving near equivalents in English to words for things Japanese. However, the acculturation process is still confined to a class of words representing things Japanese, and this shows that the Japanese variety of English remains a performance variety.