Hardship of the families. A linguistic study and categorisation of English loanwords in Japanese

Abstract

This study investigates what type of Japanese loanwords and waseieigo (Japanese made English), is the most difficult to comprehend for Swedish students studying Japanese at University. With the framework presented in Inagawa (2007) classification system, categorizing the loanwords into five different categories. Straightforward loanwords, morphologically modified loanwords, semantically modified loanwords, grammatically changed loanwords, and lastly waseieigo. A questionnaire was distributed to Swedish University students at Lund, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Dalarna University (54 first-year, 26 second-year and 12 third-year students). Altogether there were 92 participants, out of about 32 participants had studied in Japan. The words for the questionnaire were chosen from previously conducted researches in the same field. 10 words out of each category, all in all 50 words, were written in katakana with 3 different answer choices out of which 1 was correct. The paper identifies that the order of difficulty in Japanese loanwords to be as followed, semantic modification > waseieigo > morphological modification > straightforward loanwords > grammatically modified, (“>” equals “more difficult than”). It was also found in the mean percentage that the participants that had studied in Japan had a higher level of comprehension then the participants who had only studied in Sweden.