Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates COVID-19-related borrowings, discusses their functions, and investigates their perception in Japanese media discourse. It argues that such borrowings overall were perceived negatively as ‘confusing, unnecessary', and even ‘dangerous, repulsive, causing discomfort and fear’.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an immense impact on people’s lives worldwide bringing new concepts and lifestyle adjustments that found their reflection in the languages. The Japanese language had to reflect the changes in Japanese society by creating, adapting, and borrowing new lexical items both of foreign and native origin describing various COVID-19-related phenomena appearing across all the news media. However, the increased use of loanwords received a mixed reception as being confusing and hindering.

Previous research (Rebuck 2002) highlights that foreign-origin words in Contemporary Japanese mainly have one of the three following functions: 1) filling a lexical gap; 2) creating a special stylistic effect; 3) euphemistic. The functions of the new wave of foreign (mostly English) origin words were also utilized for one of the abovementioned functions. For example, some words such as パンデミック/pandemikku/ were re-introduced to fill the lexical gaps, however, most English-origin words have established native or Sino-Japanese near-synonyms and were brought in for creating special stylistic effects or euphemistic purposes. For example, 東京アラート[Tōkyō arāto] ‘Tokyo alert’ was chosen as the name of the campaign for raising awareness of the pandemic and facilitating the COVID-19 prevention measures most likely because the Sino-Japanese near-synonym 警告 [keikoku] ‘warning’ is frequently used and would not be standing out as much. The euphemistic use can be demonstrated by the example of preferring ロックダウン[rokkudaun] over 都市封鎖 [toshifūsa] which still has strong wartime associations.

The present study investigates English-origin COVID-19-related borrowings, discusses their functions, and investigates the perception of the new loanwords inflow by the Japanese media discourse. The results suggest that the use of foreign-origin words for the explanation of COVID-19-related phenomena led to the increase of ‘confusing, unnecessary’ to ‘dangerous, repulsive, causing discomfort and fear’. Thus, instead of the softening effect of the euphemistic function and the stylistic effect for the attention-drawing, the opposite effect was achieved with katakana-go developing more negative connotations.