THE IMPACT OF JAPANESE ON THE ENGLISH LEXICON SINCE 1900

Abstract

Japanese borrowings which have recently been adopted into English have as yet been relatively neglected in current research. The present study sets out to shed light on the impact of Japanese on the English lexicon since 1900. The findings presented in this paper are based on a comprehensive lexicographical corpus of 323 twentieth-century Japanese borrowings retrieved from the Oxford English Dictionary Online. The different Japanese words introduced into English in the recent past will be grouped into various domains in order to give an overview of the manifold subject areas influenced by Japanese during the last few decades.