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Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]What's up with me? Not much. What's up with vu? Yes, this video is about vu.

[00:00:04]Where it come from, why it be like that.

[00:00:06]Let's talk about it. So, if you're not familiar, if you take an u in katakana and you put a dash dash onto it, it makes a vu sound. And then we can also change it to va vi vu ve vo by applying the little small katakana, formerly known as sutegana, but most people don't actually call it that. And that allows us to write words like violin. And this mostly happens in katakana, of course, because well, katakana has had a large number of roles throughout its history.

[00:00:27]Since around the 1800s, it has seen more and more use as a script used for writing loan words. And now it is officially enshrined with that kind of purpose. Yes, the idea that katakana is the loan word script is comparatively new in its history as a script. But as a result, it is the script that for at least a hundred plus years now, Japanese people have played with when they want to add new sounds into Japanese. By new sounds, I mean sounds that do not exist inherently in what we would call {quote} native Japanese words. So, this is why, for instance, people have played with katakana to create symbols like this, which can give us a t sound, right?

[00:01:00]Because that doesn't appear in native Japanese words, but it's not super hard for Japanese people to pronounce. They have ka ki ku ke ko having taught ti tu te to is not, you know, impossible. And while we can absolutely write it in hiragana, and you know what?

[00:01:11]Theoretically, we could write it in kanji, although I might have been the first person ever to write the sound ti like this, katakana is the primary script. And so, that kind of motivation, that same idea, is of course where vu comes from. The only problem is, unlike things like ti or fa or whatever, vu and its ilk are not really part of like formal written Japanese in the sense that you would see them in like a textbook or even potentially in most documents. That doesn't mean like it's slang or casual. Like I have academic literature which has the v in the title.

[00:01:41]Look, see? Here it is. There it is.

[00:01:42]There it is. This is not a comic book.

[00:01:44]This is not a casual book. This is an academic book. But historically speaking, when Japanese people have encountered a v sound, they have not tried to recreate it in Japanese, unlike like a t sound or a fa sound, but instead just said, "We're going to go with B." And that's why while you can see people write violin with a va, generally write it as baolin. And so when I introduce these characters in my own introductory Japanese classes, what I've always said to students is that you need to know these because you will see them, but they probably won't appear in your dictionary at all or like on Wikipedia or anything like that, making them kind of a curiosity that you have to know, but that you actually may never use. And I always thought that was a fine explanation until this year when during my explanation, a student I guess tested me, tested what I was saying, and decided to look up the Wikipedia page for violin in Japanese, and they found out that it is va, not ba, with ba being the secondary representation. So, what's going on? Well, I decided to investigate. And what it turns out is basically there are different standards throughout Japan for whether you should use a B sound when writing a V or not.

[00:02:51]Now, generally speaking, I'm very happy to say that I am right. It's exhausting being right all the time, but you know, why stop when you're so good at it? And generally speaking, in major dictionaries, you will find that words like violin being written with ba.

[00:03:04]Indeed, they won't even reference the va existing. And for instance, Asahi Shimbun I went and checked out, and on their print article search function, they had 224 hits for violin with a ba, but only 35 for violin with a va. But again, this brings us to Wikipedia. So, what's going on there? Well, when the student showed this to me, I assumed it was like a recent change, something that kind of flipped. But we checked in class back to 2012, and it was still va. And so when I got home and decided to make this video, I found the exact change date, and it turns out it has been va on Wikipedia since the 18th of January 2004. But apparently, this choice is not without controversy because on the current page for violin in Japanese on Wikipedia, there's a box in the top right corner that says, "Click here to see the debate over why we use this representation." And because of this, we can actually get some insight into the thoughts of the people that decided this. Because it turns out what happened is around 2003, people on Wikipedia started arguing for the va version based on the fact that Wikipedia had like a global policy to use the representation that is closest to the native pronunciation of the word. And one thing that va has always been used for is to approximate a more native pronunciation.

[00:04:14]Indeed, that is why sometimes you will see it in places that are trying to sell themselves as like authentic, like restaurants, etc. Because if you have the authentic spelling, even though it's in katakana, it's not the Roman alphabet, you have more authentic food, right? Look, it's marketing. It's why you buy tofu instead of bean curd at your Japanese restaurant. But anyway, in 2003 this debate continued. Someone eventually chimed in to say that, "Hey, hobby magazines were using va instead of ba."

[00:04:39]Again, maybe hobbyists wanted to emphasize that they knew how to pronounce it good.

[00:04:43]And someone did a Google search and found out there were more hits on Google at the time, again, way back, for ba or in then va or in. In 2004, someone then chimed in that their high school textbook was using ba. And by that time they went with the change.

[00:04:56]Interestingly, in 2021, somebody hopped into this thread and said, "Hey, I checked Google recently, and it turns out there's now a lot more for ba or in." So apparently, like as Google expanded its search abilities, it found way more hits, whereas the lead that va or in had even back in the past was quite low. And they said, "Look, I don't think we should change it or anything, but I just want to note that this is sort of interesting." And you know what, I wanted to give my own contribution to this data, and so I went on to Google and tested my own findings, and it turns out that Google has actually updated so that ba or in and va or in return the same hits.

[00:05:27]So, we can't find out anymore. So, all in all then, I wasn't wrong in telling my students, and you I guess, that ba, bi, bu, be, bo are the preferences rather than va, vi, vu, ve, vo. But, I was wrong in citing Wikipedia because certain websites, certain places in Japan will have a preference for this.

[00:05:43]And indeed, these preferences have changed over time. And we know this because unlike some features of the Japanese language, including like katakana itself, we don't have a specific inventor, but for this we do.

[00:05:53]Because apparently vu was created around 1860 by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi, who was, you know, looking for ways to better represent English pronunciations, European pronunciations in Japanese text. I could not find a version of the original text where this was proposed, but minimally by a Google Books I could find a clear use of vu in the V sound for Victoria here in 1888. And I know it's not a false hit because the Google preview also provides the cover which says Meiji 21, which is again 1888. But while vu and its ilk did see use after being invented in like this old advertisement here, read that right to left, not left to right, in 1954 the Japanese government officially said that ba and all of its friends are the proper way to write V words. That said, in 1991 they added a specific comment stating that the vu family was allowed when trying to approximate foreign pronunciations, although that same year they also declared that vu should be avoided in teaching materials, albeit still taught in school so that students knew what it was. I guess kind of what I do in class now. And this issue keeps coming up because I was able to stumble on a debate in 2012 that was published by the NHK, where it's sort of a written round table where they begin by noting that since some specialized fields are using vu etc., we can't pretend it exists, so what should be the actual policy about it? They even propose like a list of when you should use it, you're looking at right now, and basically if I were going to sum it up for those who can't read bit Japanese, says don't use it except for writing proper names where there's like a custom of using it because there's a attempt to represent the original pronunciation and they list a bunch of like composers etc. as examples. But after this proposal they also have a bunch of comments from people and basically everyone hates it.

[00:07:29]Everyone just wants vu and its ilk to go away. So there does seem to be some like anti-vu discourse out there as well. But there you go. Vu was invented, it has had a series of uses, and while it still is not the major one, you will see people that like to use it despite that most people seem to wish it died. But I honestly imagine even going into the future, it'll kind of just maintain the role it has, which is that, you know, it's there if you want it, but we're not going to mandate anyone use it, and we really wish you didn't. And anyway, that's basically the end of the video, which if you're watching on certain apps means that the video might just repeat, in which case you'll have a sense of deja vu.