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, iruvs. 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.