The Future Of Japanese Language

Mercedo, do you think that Japanese's radical change in the last half-century or so might be contributing to your becoming distant from the linguistic mainstream? -Interrobang

Uhm...difficult question. But I must say No. My key to success was not to concern around me.

Japanese language as an official language in our daily use, hasn't changed at all from what it was 50 years ago. Grammar is exactly the same. Vocabulary..I think you are talking about vocabulary. Vocabulary we use in our daily conversation may be very different from what it was 5, 10, 25, 50 years ago. But the language our constitution, many other laws were written, or the language in the main newspaper, is completely the same as what we now use. According to the survey, the number of foreign loan words are increasing continuously. The rate of foreign words in our national language -mainly from English was about 7% soon after the World War II, now the rate is 17%, the rate has been definitely increasing but it is just a matter in rate, when it comes to the frequency of using words, we use tens of thousands times of more Japanese traditional words -mainly from China than other foreign words like English. In the world of law, we use no English words.

This reply might not be the one you are expecting from me, but the truth is so.

I thought of this because I was discussing (and we're back to Hebrew again) how present-day Modern Hebrew is radically different from the Hebrew of even 50 years ago.

This doesn't apply to the case of Japanese. Japanese language is basically consisted in a large number of Chinese words -it is the same as the case of Korean language. We -both Koreans and Japanese always use more than 70% of Chinese words very frequently in our daily life, and this is still unchanged. Our basic strata of culture take deep roots in Chinese culture, and it is not likely to change in half a century or a century, it takes much more century -though I can't tell exactly what will become of as to the future of Japanese language. Unless we experience entire social change -catastrophy, being invaded by other country, earthquake, Japan archipelagoes submerge, etc., Japanese language won't change.

NaveWeiss was helping me translate "Omrim Yeshna Eretz" into English, because I was having a hard time with it. Then I remembered how different older Japanese is to newer Japanese, even if we're talking about Japanese as it was spoken around WWII, so that sticks with me.

In particular fields like computer, etc. its Japanese is different from old Japanese, but such situations entirely depend on the 'fields' - we had no fields as to computers, so we had nothing for it but to use English. In the fields where no English alternatives are necessary, we always use Chinese. That won't change easily.

I'm afraid the situation in Hebrew and Japanese around language circumstances is just different. Hebrew is written in consonants with the help of vowel signs. Japanese is, on the other hands, written basically in ideograms called Chinese characters with the help of Japanese phonetic signs, so if we thought about the difference in origin of language in the first place between two languages, the chasm is enormous.

In spite of all claims I made, Japanese people start using English more and more from now on. I'm just saying that doesn't cause the change of Japanese language. Japanese language will remain unchanged till it's used by nobody.