J-myth 10: "Japanese English" exists

By Matthew Ward | Tuesday, Jul 21, 2009

We've all heard of terms like “American English,” “British English,” “Australian English,” “Irish English,” and the like. You've probably even heard of things like “Indian English” or “Singlish” (Singaporean English). Here in Japan, conferences about linguistics and/or foreign language teaching might bring up the concept of “Englishes,” plural, the idea that there are a lot of different varieties of English in the world. This isn't actually unique to English: any widely spoken language is bound to have developed a lot of different varieties, and we can also see this kind of thing with Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, etc. But, since English is the world's most international language, it gets lots of press, and people quite understandably find it interesting and relevant that it exists in some pretty far-flung varieties.

So, how about Japan? We've all heard of “Japanese English,” right? Does Japan actually have its own variety of English, like Ireland or Singapore or New Zealand? Could, for example, all of those crazy messages on T-shirts actually represent a consistent variety of English that only Japanese people (or people living in Japan) can easily understand? I've sometimes heard newcomers to Japan say things like “well, I haven't learned much Japanese yet, but I can speak a lot of Japanese English!”

To answer this question, first I'm going to point out that if we call something Japanese English, we are implying that it is the same as, say, Scottish English, Irish English or Australian English, following the standard equation of “national adjective + name of language = a national dialect.”

Second, we need to look at this world “dialect” a little bit. A dialect is a variety of a language, with vocabulary, pronunciation (“accent”) and grammar that have noticeable differences with other dialects, and yet is consistent in and of itself. One of the biggest misunderstandings people have about dialects is the idea that “I don't speak a dialect.” It's true that some dialects (like Tokyo Japanese or my relatively “standard” West Coast American English) tend to be more widespread than others, but they will still sound distinctive to speakers of other dialects. For example, my “baby carriage” is a British person's “pram.” My clearly pronounced “r” sound at the end of words like “car” is not pronounced by people from many parts of Great Britain or the American Northeast. In my dialect of English, the words “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same, but in many other dialects of English, they are systematically different.

The difference between a dialect and a separate language isn't always completely clear-cut, but the usual linguistic (as opposed to political) criterion is mutual intelligibility. Norwegian and Swedish, for example, have different names but are fairly mutually intelligible, so linguistically they are considered to be dialects of the same language. Monolingual speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese essentially can't understand each other's speech, so it's not really true that both languages are dialects of “Chinese”: they are both members of the same language family, but not examples of varieties of the same language.

Most dialects of any given language are spoken by native speakers, simply because non-native speakers seldom have enough opportunity to use a second or foreign language enough to evolve a systematic community version of it. However, one interesting thing about languages like English or Swahili or Mandarin Chinese that are spoken extensively by non-native speakers is that non-native dialects may develop, usually among second-language (as opposed to foreign-language) speakers. For example, most people in India are not native speakers of English, but English is used enough in India that you can make whole dictionaries of “Indian English.” That's not too surprising, considering that it's one of the official languages of the country and is used by millions of Indians to communicate with each other. It doesn't mean that all Indians speak Indian English (many don't speak English at all) or that Indian English is a monolithic variety, but just that it's used systematically enough for consistent varieties to develop.

To sum this all up, dialects are systematic, rule-board mutually intelligible varieties of a language. To get away from English for a moment, here in Japan we have “standard” Japanese and Kansai-ben—fairly mutually intelligible, but obviously different in systematic ways: tabenai vs. tabehen, da vs. ya, iru vs. oru, etc.

So, now that we are clear on what a dialect is, is Japanese English an example of one? What do people actually mean when they speak of Japanese English, anyway? In my experience, the term “Japanese English” is kind of a blanket term to cover a few quite different things, so let's have a look at these things separately:

1). “Wasei Eigo.” Often translated as “Japanese English,” these are the well-known English-derived (or allegedly English derived!) katakana terms that are extremely common in modern Japanese. We all know many common examples: basu means “bus,” manshon means “condominium,” biiru means “beer,” wan-pisu means “dress,” peepaa doraibaa means “a person who has a driver's license but doesn't actually drive, and so on. These words are certainly distinctive, and they certainly differ from “normal” English, so do they qualify as Japanese English?

The real problem with equating wasei Eigo “Japanese English” is that these words are not examples of English at all, but rather of perfectly ordinary Japanese words. Sure, many of them come from English (some of them, like biiru, actually come from other European language), and others (peepaa doraibaa) are derived from English words), but that doesn't make them examples of English. There are actually a lot more Chinese or Chinese-derived words in Japanese (even very “Japanese” words like kampai, banzai, genki, kawaii, or gohan are essentially Chinese loanwords!), but we don't speak of a dialect of Chinese called “Japanese-Chinese.” If I am having a conversation in English back home, and I happen to use Japanese-derived English words like “honcho,” “tycoon,” “karaoke” and “soy sauce,” I'm not speaking “English Japanese” either, I'm just speaking ordinary English that happens to feature some loan words from Japanese.

Actually, the funny thing about the term wasei Eigo is that, arguably, it doesn't mean “Japanese English” at all. First, wasei means “Japanese made,” not “Japanese,” and while Eigo certainly can be translated as “English,” the character used to write go can also mean “words,” (as in tango, “vocabulary,” which literally means “single words” or perhaps “single units of language”). So, we could also translate wasei Eigo as “Japanese-made English words,” which would mean that they were English words coined by Japanese people. This is at least somewhat more accurate than calling them “Japanese English,” but it's still clear that, no matter what their origins are, katakana words are still Japanese words, not English words. At any rate, even if we insist on thinking of them as “English” words, a collection of vocabulary alone cannot comprise a variety of a language.

2). “Crazy English on T-shirts, advertisements, etc.” I can still remember when some of my parents' friends went to Japan back in the 80's, and all they could talk about on their return was “the crazy English messages on T-shirts.” I've actually read a linguist (who, granted, obviously didn't know much about Japan or how English is used here) cite these messages as an example of a unique Japanese dialect of English. The idea seems to be that Japanese people, being fluent in Japanese English, know what these mysterious messages mean, but the hapless non-Japanese are left scratching their heads.

Most readers of this article probably know better: Japanese people can't read these messages any better than we can. In fact, most of them don't even try. Next time you see a bizarre English message on a T-shirt or advertisement, ask your Japanese friends what the message means. The most usual response is puzzlement: why would anybody try to read those messages anyway? After that, you'll occasionally get some kind of perception that a native speaker would not have, but even more often, you'll get complete befuddlement, or something to the effect of “It's your language, why can't you read it?”

The thing that's important to understand about these messages is that, for the most part, they are not meant to communicate meaning at all. They are meant to communicate a certain image. In fact, messages in French, Italian or even languages like Hindi or Thai are used in the same way: making something seem high-class or modern or exotic or quaint. Occasionally, well-placed words that are familiar to Japanese (usually because they have been borrowed into Japanese) like “enjoy” or “get!” help add a little meaning to the image, but for the most part, the image itself is the message. It's also helpful to remember that Japan is not the only culture that uses foreign languages in this way: other Asian cultures like Thailand or Taiwan are fond of using messages in mangled Japanese as well as English to adorn products, and Western people have been showing an increasing fondness for using mangled kanji on tatoos.

Basically, these messages don't reflect an exotic Japanese dialect of English, they simply reflect the English abilities of the individual writer. If you get an advertising writer who has been asking to create an English message to adorn a product, depending on the writer's knowledge of English, you might get anything from a “normal” or virtually normal English message on one extreme, to complete word salad on another extreme. When you think about it, the same exact thing would happen if most of the English-speaking readers of this article were asked to construct messages in Japanese: Depending on our ability, the message might vary enormously, and while some of them might look fairly normal, many others might look pretty downright weird. (granted, some of us might ask a native speaker of Japanese whether the message actually made any sense, but then again, judging from the kanji tattoos I see when I go back home, we might not!). Crucially, they would probably have some features in common because they would all be influenced by English, but they would otherwise not be classifiable as some kind of exotic gaijin dialect of “English-Japanese.” And that point leads me to the 3rd example of “Japanese English”:

3). “How Japanese people speak English:” Really, to be fair, the two examples above, although they are often described as “Japanese English,” would be poor places to look for examples of a dialect anyway. Dialects are primarily represented by spoken language, not by written language, and certainly not by a collection of loanwords. And, it is indeed true that Japanese people tend to speak English in a similar way, with distinctive grammar patterns, pronunciation and vocabulary. So, wouldn't something like “the distinctive way that Japanese people speak English” be better evidence of a Japanese dialect of English?

Here's the simple answer to this question: Whenever people learn a new language, they are influenced by their native languages, and that makes their speech both distinctive and similar to others sharing the same mother tongue. However, just being influenced by ones native language is not enough to comprise a dialect.

For example, I'm sure that Russian universities have classes in Swahili, and you can be sure that the students speak with a Russian accent and with a noticeable influence of Russian grammar and vocabulary, but does that mean that there is a “Russian Swahili”? Plenty of Thai people study Mandarin Chinese, but can we say that there is a dialect of Mandarin called “Thai Chinese?” Not really. The influence of the mother tongue on second and foreign languages is a fascinating subject, but it shouldn't be confused with the creation of new dialects.

I remember reading an article in one of the English-language newspapers here in Japan in which the author called for recognition of Japanese English as a legitimate dialect. One example he used to bolster his claim was something to the effect that “in Japanese English, 'staff' can be pluralized.” The author admitted to not knowing much Japanese, but if he did know Japanese, he might have realized that in Japanese, staffu usually refers to an individual employee (a staff MEMBER), rather than a group of employees as the English “staff” does. So, when Japanese people speak English and they say things like “I had a meeting with my staffs yesterday,” they are simply using the word in its Japanese sense because they aren't aware that the word is a group noun in English. In these kinds of situations, we can certainly say that wasei eigo influences how Japanese people speak English and can create the impression of a Japanese variety of English. However, ultimately it is just the same kind of thing as when people say things like “Almost the people in Japanese eat rice” or “I went to shopping”; they are just showing the influence of Japanese. It's all quite revealing and interesting, but it's also a very normal and unremarkable aspect of language learning.

When English-speaking foreigners claim to speak “Japanese English,” as far as I can tell, they are using a lot of wasei eigo words in their Japanese sense, plus dropping articles and plurals (so-called “Tarzan English”), plus a few other basic strategies like using present tense for the future and perhaps using some so-called “katakana pronunciation.” Depending on one's perspective, it's either amusing or annoying, but it's pretty important to note that if Japanese English were a real dialect, it wouldn't be something one could learn by trying to sound like Tarzan with a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, we all do find our English influenced to some degree by either Japanese or by how Japanese people use English, but this shouldn't be confused with learning a new dialect.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with the concept of Japanese English is that there is no real basis for it existing at all. Japan has never been colonized by an English-speaking country and already has an extremely dominant and well-developed lingua franca. Most newcomers to Japan are coming from non-English speaking countries like China, Korea and Brazil, and they and the Japanese quite logically use Japanese as their common language. English is mostly used as it is in other countries where it is a foreign (rather than second or native) language: for international communication, business and tourism, plus for communicating with the small minority of foreign residents who speak more English than Japanese. Barring some kind of unforeseen catastrophe like invasion and colonization by an English-speaking power, Japanese English seems destined to remain a myth.

Matthew Ward's Profile

Late 30's, have lived in Asia for a lot of my life.

Interests: Music, politics, linguistics, learning languages, culture, food, traveling.

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