Essay About Japanese English Language Contact

1. Introduction

1.1. Scope

My research takes place within the context of Japanese-English language contact. Although individual contacts between native speakers of Japanese and English must have occurred earlier, the Japanese-English language contact attained systematic character in the 19th century. It ebbed briefly in the 1930s, on the onset of the Pacific War, when the government took measures in limiting the use and circulation of English, but was resumed with a new vigour after the War. The presence of English rapidly grew as well as the domains of its usage.

The prolonged and intense language contact has resulted in the nativisation of English borrowings within the Japanese language system. For the overwhelming majority of the population of Japan their English proficiency is limited to the English skills obtained at school and university and picked up through international advertising, popular English-language media, and extensive Internet use. In this minimal form English has become a mass societal phenomenon in Japan and a potent instrument in the linguistic play.

As of now, the use of English is particularly prevalent in

However, while the topic of the circulation of English in Japan has fascinated a number of scholars, a significantly smaller number of them dedicated their research to the sociolinguistic aspect of this language contact. One of the earliest works in this area was written by James Stanlaw in 1983. In the article titled “English in Japanese communicative strategies,” he analysed the speech of three male and two female college students in the academic and everyday life situations and noticed certain patterns in their use of English based on the gender of the speaker and the social situation. However, his work had a merely preliminary character due to some of its methodological