Towards the Effective Adoption of English Loanwords for Japanese Public Communication

A Welfare Linguistic Analysis of Data from National Surveys

Abstract

The present research, conducted from a viewpoint of welfare linguistics, discusses the manner in which loanwords from English should be adopted for public communication in Japan. It explores a new approach to interpreting data from national surveys on loanwords from English using logistic regression analysis. The analysis reveals that there is often a discrepancy between the general public and regional government workers in the level of preference for the adoption of homophonic translation (a phonetic equivalent of the English word in katakana). It also reveals that the general public’s level of comprehension, or literacy, of a certain homophonic translation cannot be identified with their level of preference for the adoption of that word. These findings suggest that better public communication could result if those who publish announcements, e.g. regional government workers, take these issues into consideration.