Issues and prospects for incorporating English use in Japan into the dictionary

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a ‘Concentric Circles Model’ (CCM) for a diglossic ‘balancing’ of both prescriptivist and descriptivist concerns regarding English usage in Japan. The model draws on theories of lexical priming and cultural intelligence, and characterises the construct of ‘Japanese English’ as inseparable from the speaker’s prior linguistic, societal and cultural experiences. Codification is an important step towards the legitimisation of a non-native variety such as Japanese English; at the same time, the dictionary has become a more fluid notion that is characterised by both ‘competitive’ and ‘cooperative’ lexicography. The article also demonstrates the use of the corpus-based methodology to enrich the lexical content of dictionary entries encapsulated by the CCM. In addition, a resource such as the Global Web-based Corpus of English (GloWbE) is used to demonstrate a bright future in which internal and external norms move away from the current adherence to monolingual standard English to one that represents broad agreement in terms of empirical frequencies of usage across varieties of English.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese English
• corpus lexicography
• lexical priming
• wasei eigo
• the dictionary
• cultural intelligence

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kanta Toshima, Masaaki Ogura, Ai Inoue, Yutaro Masuda and others for various discussions on the notions of ‘standard English’, ‘wasei eigo’, etc.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-words-in-english-dictionaries/.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotchkiss.

3. An interesting list that characterises wasei eigo terms as ‘pseudo-English’ words is found at https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/wasei-eigo.html; another list of 90 wasei eigo terms is found at https://www.lingual-ninja.com/2018/09/japlish-wasei-eigo.html.

4. The Covid-19 situation has brought about a number of buzzwords: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/11/05/national/japan-2020-buzzwords-nominations/.

5. Wikipedia entry for ‘salaryman’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman.

6. Various Youtube videoclips provide textual evidence of Decorative English in various contexts: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ-dBHCHo3E.

7. The GloWbE Corpus: see https://www.english-corpora.org/GloWbE/.

8. A site that contains Japanese Internet slang: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slang/.

9. ‘Japanese: a language in flux’. Available online: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/09/23/general/japanese-a-language-in-a-state-of-flux/.

10. For anime and other reborrowings from Japanese to English, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gairaigo.

11. emoi: https://justalittlejapanese.com/what-does-emoi-mean/.

12. See https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=wwwww.

13. https://i.redd.it/9bbcvozwbum51.png.

14. A model is defined as ‘an informative representation of an object, person or system’ in Wikipedia: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model.

15. Abenomask now appears in Simple Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abenomask.

16. “Amount of ‘kozukai’ allowance ties into salaryman’s ‘social class’”: https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/amount-of-monthly-kozukai-allowance-ties-into-salarymans-social-class.

17. ‘skinship’: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/search?query=skinship.