English Loanwords in Japanese: Phonetic Observations

Abstract

Japan is a highly industrialized, modern society, and it need surprise no one that a very large part of the vocabulary of modern life has been borrowed from English. Even though the number of borrowed words is very high, the phonetic structure of Japanese has not been influenced significantly by English. Japanese has strict rules which allow only certain types of syllables. This is one of the most striking differences between English and Japanese. The number of syllables usually changes when a word is borrowed from English. In English, there are consonant clusters. Most of these consonant combinations are impossible in Japanese. How are these differences embodied in the loanwords? These and similar questions are investigated in this paper, and a number of selective examples are demonstrated to support the statements.