A new American-lineage English?: Proportions of American variants in Japanese English

ABSTRACT

This article inquires into the proportions of putative American variants in diachronic data of Japanese English and, subsequently, comments on the direction this specific East Asian, Expanding Circle English is taking, particularly in relation to change broadly and Americanization specifically. As a whole, Japanese English has a very obvious preference for American variants. Although the proportions of American variants in Japanese English have declined from the 1960s to the 1990s, such a decline is not significant. Comparatively across Englishes, Japanese English also stands as such a heavily American-influenced English that it has even surpassed American and Philippine Englishes in its recorded use of American variants. Thus, from a variationist sociolinguistic and diachronic standpoint, it could be said that Japanese English is has very strong preference for American variants, almost to the point of appearing as an American-lineage English.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese English
• diachronic change
• Americanization
• corpus linguistics

Acknowledgements

The study reported in this article is part of a bigger Early Career Scientist project titled ‘Americanization across Englishes’ funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No. 19K13219 given to the author). Analysis of the data was completed through the help of research assistant Yusuke Yasuda. The author would like to thank John Christopher Castillo for help with statistics for the analysis. The author dedicates this article on Japanese English to all of the Japanese students he has taught since 2014, first at Tamagawa University, then The University of Tokyo and, eventually, now at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The author hopes that this will be a worthy inquiry into the variety of English they use.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.