Loanwords and the "Death" of Japanese

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Is the Japanese language being conquered by English loan words?

[00:00:03]>> Absolutely not. Hi, I'm here to talk about a video I saw that is bad. So, I was on TikTok minding my own business, trying to have a good time, and this street interview video came up talking about how English loan words are destroying Japanese. Ooh, there's a spooky gravestone. Oh my gosh. In fact, this bothered me so much that after recording the first take of this, I thought of more things I wanted to add.

[00:00:21]And so, I'm in different clothing on a different day, adding things to the video that I forgot to say or should have said. They begin by noting that 15% of Japanese everyday vocabulary is combined of English loan words. That's nuts. It's also not new and it's also kind of not true. If you want to know the actual situation of how loan words are affecting Japanese, the most up-to-date best text you can do for that is this book here, Lone Words and Japanese Identity by Dr. Nako Hosokawa.

[00:00:48]And it notes in it, citing other studies, that actually loan words, so from all languages, not just English, have made up about 13.6% of Japanese texts dating back to at least the 1970s.

[00:01:00]And if this video has some statistic, they don't cite any.

[00:01:04]>> It's said that up to 15% of everyday Japanese vocabulary is comprised of English loan words.

[00:01:09]>> That shows it's gone up by 1ish%. That's not a big deal. And indeed, Congo, which of course come from Chinese, can make up a larger percent of the text than quote unquote native Japanese words. But nobody notices because they're not written in katakana. So they're seen to be like more Japanese.

[00:01:24]>> Let's see if you can spot the lone words in the following text.

[00:01:32]But the same book also notes, some Japanese people say that they never use lone words, which is impossible in 2026.

[00:01:38]Like there is no Japanese native word for television or anything like that. So the idea of what makes something a loan word is going to depend on the person.

[00:01:45]Yes, that same book does note that there has been like an increase in katakana in certain areas such as magazines. And if you look at the entire number of words in Japanese, I'd say that lone words are probably increasing faster than the other two. But that's just because they represent new things. And you have to remember that a lot of words will enter Japanese and then die and never be used again. And so they seem new and weird just like the slang terms I talk about in most my videos, but they're not actually increasing the percentage of katakana based vocabulary used in Japanese speech. They're just increasing the amount in the dictionary because dictionaries will log a word and then never erase it. So it just sits in the database. And sure, as the video notes, globalization is increasing.

[00:02:24]There is a dominance of English. And so more words are coming in from English than Chinese. But on the objective statistics, it's not like Katakana's presence in the Japanese language is increasing by that much.

[00:02:41]Additionally, if words coming from English is a problem, well, skyscraper is a lone word. It just doesn't look like it. Yeah, skyscraping tower. It's called a cal. It's how we borrow words and hide them. Japanese people made the word for democracy muugi by translating western texts and then that was actually borrowed by Chinese and it's like why they can take concentric circuit and turn it into consento without our consento and that's fine and it's why you can say karaoke even though that's a terrible pronunciation languages are complicated we're always sharing we're always changing we're always evolving more importantly though the video frames this as being used in cases where there's perfectly good Japanese words and they're even used in cases where perfectly good Japanese already exists.

[00:03:22]>> As if that's not a reason for borrowing.

[00:03:24]We do that all the time for nuance. And if the words were perfectly good, then Japanese people wouldn't borrow them.

[00:03:31]Obviously, one reason that you borrow a word into your own language is because you don't have that word. But other times, you borrow a word into your own language because the word that you have is actually not good enough. It has vibes to it that are kind of uncomfortable. For instance, one of the classic examples that comes up in like every history of loan words textbook is that the word rol, right? So loan was borrowed into Japanese by Japanese people intentionally because shaken, the former word for a loan, which works fine. It means borrowed money, right?

[00:03:58]Why do you need a new word? Well, it had bad vibes. People weren't supposed to have shocking, right? If you had shocking, well, then you were a person who was in debt. But if you were a person who had a ron, you were something new. And the introduction of this was intentional by people trying to loan people money to get rid of kind of the stink that shocking had to it. And we've done this too in English. Like, hey, do you want to go with me and eat some bean curd? No. Does that sound disgusting?

[00:04:24]What about tofu?

[00:04:26]Oh, yes, that sounds great. Let's go have some tofu, which is absolutely not bean curd.

[00:04:31]>> And they're even used in cases where perfectly good Japanese already exists.

[00:04:35]>> Do you want to eat some seaweed? No. How about some nori? That sounds great.

[00:04:39]>> Already exists.

[00:04:40]>> For instance, the video specifically mentions words like stafu as like a problem.

[00:04:44]>> Let's see if you can spot the lone words in the following text.

[00:04:52]But are they? While Japanese has a lot of Congo in it, sometimes these words can sound like omokurushi. They sound heavy.

[00:05:00]>> Indeed, there are like Japanese business guides that warn you against using too much kanji and too much kongo in them because it sounds really really authorative and unpleasant. So while there is a word like jugo for employee, it does sound, you know, very official and formal. And like penning is okay, but like what if you're not a misay, right? Well, staf fu is light. It ends in a nice ooh sound and it works for basically everything. So, that makes it kind of convenient. The other words still exist. They still can be used.

[00:05:27]Adding these words doesn't kick out a bunch of older words. Japanese people can still use the words that used to exist if they wanted to. And if this interview channel wants to put their money where their mouth is and be the not change that they want to see in the world, they're welcome to do that. I encourage you go up to your partner and say that you're going to sepoon them instead of kissing them. Talk about how you have to go out and get some shocking for your upcoming house purchase. Start using colors like Numiro or Momo instead of the lone words for gray and pink and stuff like that. You're allowed to sound like a visual K singer or an anka singer or something. That's fine. And like you flag words throughout this video as if there's something weird about it like they use.

[00:06:08]>> What do you want them to use instead?

[00:06:09]Aji yo koku yiku ai tsuya omosiroa some of these could work but they all have different implications and they're even used in cases where perfectly good Japanese already exists >> and the Japanese person that is speaking is an intelligent human being and they're choosing a word from these to get the right implications and vibes.

[00:06:32]Increasing the number of vocabulary in your language makes you a more proficient speaker, not a worse one.

[00:06:38]It's not evidence of degradation. It's evidence of increased variety in the way that you can navigate your own world.

[00:06:44]Indeed, if Japanese people know more words now than they used to, isn't that evidence of a positive growth? And indeed, I would say it's contemptuous to look at the people in Japan and being like, "Those people are using the wrong words. Why are they throwing away their words?" Well, why do you think? Why don't you ask them? Stafu is not like a rare word that Japanese people don't understand. They use it a lot, so they clearly find some kind of value in it.

[00:07:05]These are intelligent people making linguistic choices. And if the words are well, I'll let the video describe them >> or awkward sounding English, >> then they wouldn't be used. They're not awkward sounding.

[00:07:24]Awkward sounding words don't get adopted. And if they do, people look at the people that use them awkwardly and they don't become like a normal word that everybody uses like Stafu does. And then it like does this thing where they say a Japanese sentence that has a bunch of katakana loan words in it.

[00:07:37]>> Let's see if you can spot the lone words in the following text and ask Japanese people if they see anything weird about it. And most of them say no.

[00:07:52]>> And then they present like oh but there were so many words in it. Don't you know that you flag this guy for saying globalization using what should he say instead? That's internationalization. That's a different thing. Global international aren't the same thing. Do you want him to say?

[00:08:14]Well, he can't because as we can see from Weblio, that's a synonym for terraforming. And why didn't you highlight the word European when it was spoken by the guy who agrees with your intent for making the video?

[00:08:31]>> Shouldn't he be saying or something like that? I guess he just respects Europeans too much. But no, he agrees with you, so we'll give him a pass. It's good journalism. I had this exact same conversation a few years ago when I was shinking out to like some Enaka Kini, right? Because they had like a Gente anime Kurabo thing at that convenient.

[00:08:52]And so like I got my Ekki Ben. It was super kawaii.

[00:09:07]Although, you know, it was a scoch overpriced as well, but that's okay cuz it had like that wobbishabi vibe to it, right? So, I'm willing to pay a bit extra for that. But when I arrived, my friend there who's from like my university circle, which is a manga circle by the way, they were like, "English never borrows loan words for words it already has." And I was like, "You know, I think you're wrong." But who knows? That may just be like a koni guy.

[00:09:25]>> The cross-sections on these sandes are actually insane.

[00:09:31]>> Want me to tell you another tokosatu fact?

[00:09:36]>> Then the video goes on to get even worse by doing a bunch of leading questions.

[00:09:40]Like this one, they frame it as like Japanese learners are so upset that Japanese people aren't using Japanese.

[00:09:45]What's going on with that?

[00:09:53]>> But here's the thing. Loan words are Japanese. The word loan word is trash.

[00:09:57]While I have problems with Gigo as well, it's much better because it's words that came from abroad, and most of them did.

[00:10:03]When you loan someone a word, they keep it. They manipulate it as they want, and they never give it back to you. And that's why it often changes meaning. In Japanese, for instance, anime is all animation. Sake is all alcohol. But in English, we borrowed them and we restricted their meaning. This is why in Japanese pinchon is not used to mean like this, but like this because they took it from high tension power lines and they decided to do their own thing with it. It's why there's all those wonderful was ael like baby cars for pram. These are Japanese words. They have been integrated into Japanese phenology and they've been integrated into Japanese grammar. Indeed, these kind of wonderful combinations are throughout the entirety of Japanese history. And you can see how silly it is to call them like English words or non-Japanese words when you have words like one I stumbled across recently that I just learned is mechi which is like that something is like steampunky. It looks mechanical which obviously comes from the borrowing for mechanical but then they've added not just e to it and not turning it into a nadjective but actually actually adding she to the end creating a whole new really Japanese word that wouldn't have existed without this kind of borrowing. This is great.

[00:11:01]This is evidence of Japanese growing and evolving and developing and becoming a richer language which has more ways to express yourself as designed by Japanese individuals and leading questions via a street interview which presented as a problem are missing that point and really looking down on the agency and the creativity of the Japanese average language user. Like they present this guy as saying that when you swap out these words with English words, again, they're not English words. They're yours now, Japan. Congratulations. You own them. You have to feed them and water them and take care of them. Some nuances lost.

[00:11:51]There's a different nuance, but like that's the point. There's a different nuance. And there's also some sketchy things that are being done with the translations here. Because if you look at this, It's translated as an English loan word, but the word being used is yokomoji, which is any kind of borrowing from the west. Now, I will give the video credit.

[00:12:12]I will say that it's right in the fact that a lot of Japanese people are concerned about loan words. This is something that comes up in dialogue all the time. Governor Koiki, for instance, was critiqued heavily for overusing loan words. It's mentioned in this book. I myself have written academic article on a phenomenon called Yokomoji, which you can read. It's open access in it. I know a lot of criticisms of words written in katakana of people that overuse these words. The video has examples of people saying that people overuse these words because they want to sound smart and I have that in my data.

[00:12:46]So I'm not agreeing with that. The question is first is it a real problem?

[00:12:49]And the second is is this a problem that actually Japanese people are super concerned about? And if you actually look at real academic research on this, which has been going on for years, there are tons of studies on the whole katakana loan word problem, and they all come to the same conclusion, which is that if you ask Japanese people about it, they go, "Yeah, yeah, it kind of sucks." But then when you ask, "Would you want the government to do something about it, like actually restrict the import of loan words or ban them or have like facilities like they have in France, which like choose what words are proper?" Everyone says no. They don't want to go that far. So, while you can see examples plentiful in Japanese media, of paring the over katakana user, like a Gretzkco had one, the reality is it's kind of like that joke about how everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac and everyone who drives slower than you is a Because for most Japanese people, a number of lone words are very, very useful to their daily lives. But people who are using more lone words than you are are trying to be western, while people who are using less than you are stuck in the past. Just talk about my own data again. I found an argument where somebody was saying that the use of the word regime was really pretentious and someone else saying like, "Oh my god, I cannot imagine working with you or in your workplace where you guys find that word to be super pretentious and weird." The fact of the matter is Japanese is alive, which means it's going to change. It's always been changing and it always will change. The reason I like talking about slang on these videos is that most of the changes won't actually have an impact. They'll just go away. My entire channel is full of content that people 10 or 20 years from now will probably have never heard of because the slang terms will die. But sometimes it will change. And if you want Japanese to be this pure unchanging thing, if you wanted to access Japanese without any influence of any loan words, you have to go way back in time, like all the way to the Yahwei or something like that.

[00:14:23]>> No, no, I mean the Yawi Jai, which is between 801 AD January and 801 AD December, when all the men just started kissing each other for a year for some reason. But honestly, even if Japan was just like an island that no one ever visited, it never contacted anything, like it was just floating in space and nobody bothered it, the language would still change. The only way to not have your language change is to have it to die. Latin doesn't have a lot of English borrowings. But I don't want Japan in the Japanese language to die. And the fact of the matter is new generations of Japanese people will have to navigate new worlds. And so they'll develop new words to do that. And some of those words may be borrowed from abroad, like a word like AI. Sometimes there's already a good word and you're like, "Okay, I'll just use that word." But even more importantly, I just want to end this video by saying that like you got to be careful with the street video content stuff. I find it to be just a mess of a genre. But remember that you could have a street interview in any country getting any opinion just by interviewing the people you want and throwing out all the people that say the wrong thing. For instance, say you wanted to make a video proving that Japanese is like super conservative. So you interview people about gay rights and you find people that oppose it. You could make that content, but if you look at the actual statistics, most Japanese people are in favor of it with government in action being kind of the reason why it's not going through. So when you watch this content, note how many people are actually being interviewed and note how much they're allowed to say. Especially note how many questions are yes or no leading questions.

[00:15:46]>> Hello random person on the street. Some immigrants to Australia are saying that squirrels are going to take over Australia and destroy it. What do you think about that? Oh, I'd like to avoid that. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is not a moral panic and we can absolutely draw informed conclusions from this video. For instance, one of the better street interview creators I think exists in the Japanese ecosystem is this guy here. And like I don't watch a huge amount of his content, but I noticed that there's a lot less cut editing.

[00:16:23]He lets people fully express their thoughts and he asks open-ended questions. But even then, like he made a video where he interviewed some people on the street about if it's okay to cheat.

[00:16:35]>> And it led to this whole discourse online, especially in places like Twitter or something like, "Oh, in Japan you can just cheat whatever." And I even had somebody comment on one of my videos being like, "Wait a minute, I thought you could just cheat in Japan. No one cared." That's not the case. This is just a few people in one specific area of Japan. It is not representative of the entirety of the Japanese history.

[00:16:52]Indeed, there was even like a classic karaoke song in Japan, sung from the perspective of a wife who's like, "Hey, if you cheat on me, I'm going to put poison in your food.

[00:17:12]It's a banger. My wife sung it once at karaoke and I was scared." The fact of the matter is that cultures are complex and understanding any of them to any real extent requires not only big statistics like demographic surveys etc. but also a variety of investigations which are not rooted in questions that have no respect or even worse no interest in the actual history of things or the basic fact which is that in 2026 no language on this planet especially not languages which are the primary languages of nations and enforced by those nations and education materials etc would look anything like it is if it wasn't for huge amounts of contact and borrowing both explicit as of course katakana makes things but also so implicit such as when words like tempura etc get eventually written in kanji so that Japanese people forget and perhaps language learners never learn that they are actually loan words. So there is my rant. I highly encourage you to be skeptical of all short form media on Japan and Japanese that you encounter including mine. But I hope you enjoyed this video so that the next time you watch one of mine you're excited and you go hey long time no see which is probably from Chinese. Oh no, English is dying. I'm going to go make a video asking people they would feel bad if English just became a bunch of Chinese words with English grammar in it. No, I'm just kidding. I wouldn't do that because I wouldn't want you to be brainwashed.