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Translingual Words
Translingual Words
An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English
Jieun Kiaer
Jieun Kiaer
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Jieun Kiaer
The right of Jieun Kiaer to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
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A catalog record has been requested for this book
Acknowledgements vi
Part I
Birth of translingual words 1
1 Foreign words: aliens and denizens? 5
2 Hybrid words: anomalies? 16
3 Subcultural words: peripheral words? 25
4 Translingual words 33
Part II
East Asian words in English 51
5 First arrivals 53
6 Settlement 63
7 Stylistic variations 75
Part III
English words in East Asian languages 91
8 Directly-imported English words 93
9 Locally-made English words 113
10 Global words 128
Bibliography 147
Index 152
Acknowledgements
Birth of
translingual words
Like people, words around the globe are constantly on the move, and there
are countless examples of foreign-born words or words with foreign heri-
tage in our daily lives. These words are becoming so common that most of
the time they do not feel foreign to us at all. As well as becoming more
numerous, the identities and lives of these words are becoming increas-
ingly complex and diverse – resembling our own migration demographics.
In addition, the amount of hybrid words with different lexical origins is
also increasing fast, and widespread use of social media is bringing greater
amounts of subcultural words into the main lexicon. As a result, the terms
traditionally used to describe the transfer from one language to another,
such as ‘borrowing’ or ‘loanwords’, are inadequate in describing words
with such complex and diverse stories.
In the twentieth century, the primacy of national languages meant that
debates around the protection of one’s national language were prominent
across the globe (Phillipson 1992, 2003). As a result, foreign-born words
or words with foreign heritage were often considered outsiders in their
new home languages. However, in the twenty-first century there is less of
a clear distinction between native and foreign words, owing to both the
sheer number of foreign words, and the increase of multilingual and multi-
cultural societies.
As the number of languages we encounter in our everyday lives
increases, so does the complexity of the origins of our words. In order to
capture the nature of these words with diverse origins and complex life
trajectories, I introduce the notion of translingual words in this book.
Translingual words are words that live across the borders of languages.
These words constantly travel and re-settle in different languages. As a
part of their adaptation processes, they gain local forms and meanings. The
development of social media has made this adaptation process much more
diverse than before. Individuals or groups actively participate in shaping
forms and meanings of these words. Unlike the pre-social media era where
2 Birth of translingual words
many people were limited to local forms of words produced by mainstream
linguistic authorities or media, the advent of social media has opened the
doors for ordinary people to participate actively in making, sharing, and
spreading words of their own. Words on social media can have highly
individualised forms and meanings, and the ease of access offered by
social media has boosted large-scale communication across different
languages. This large-scale communication provides crucial living
environments for translingual words.
This book shows the need to shift from a monolingual lexical model
into a multilingual, dynamic lexical model in order to accommodate the
flexible, fluid and multi-faceted nature of the translingual words in our
global lexicon.
In this book, we focus mainly on an East Asian lexical encounter with
English. We aim to look at the situation in mainland China,1 Japan and
Korea (mostly South)2 and additionally some data from Taiwan, Hong
Kong, and Macau. Large-scale lexical encounters between East Asian lan-
guages and English happened relatively late as we shall explore. However,
it is now happening in an unprecedented scope and speed. China has been
relatively slow in receiving English words compared to Japan and Korea
for a number of socio-political reasons, but in recent years the English lan-
guage has had a more substantial impact in China.
The lexical interaction between the non-Latinate, Sino-sphere world
and the Latinate world is worth mentioning because this has caused exten-
sive variation in the ways in which words are represented. These variations
have been on the rise in recent years as ordinary people interact interna-
tionally through social media. In such cases, they tend not to follow set-
ways of transcription but freely use their own means of exchange. In light
of these ever-increasing variations, in this book I will use the Romanised
forms of words which seem most suitable for the setting in which they are
being used, rather than systematically following one or two Romanisation
methods.
Unless otherwise stated, English here does not refer to a particular
variety of English (i.e. US or UK English), but to varieties of English or
global, international varieties of English (Crystal 2000). These varieties
are not necessarily those from Kachru’s inner-circle English, but also outer
and expanding circles of English. In this sense, therefore is the target of
our discussion.
Social media
Part of the methodology for this study will examine social media in order
to trace the online lives of translingual words. This methodology will
consist of content analysis of comments featuring the selected words made
on popular social media platforms, with a particular emphasis on Twitter.
Twitter is open to the general public for academic purposes and no
identifiable information has been included in Tweets featured in this study.
As Twitter allows users to search by hashtag and features accurate time
stamping for each Tweet, we will be able to track any potential linguistic
developments over the past ten years. As relatively less data is available
pre-2008, we will be using data from social media from 2008 to the
present.
Notes
1 In this book ‘China’ will refer primarily to mainland China.
2 In this book ‘Korea’ will refer primarily to South Korea, unless otherwise
indicated.
1 Foreign words
Aliens and denizens?
James Murray (1837–1915), the first editor of the Oxford English Diction-
ary (OED), referred to foreign words as ‘uncommon words’, and as ‘aliens
and denizens’ of the English language. As a lexicographer working at the
peak of the explosion of new words in the early twentieth century, he
struggled with the question of how best to classify words that had entered
English from other languages. Were they English words or not? On what
grounds? Like most of the editors of the OED after him, he held an inclu-
sive view as the following quote shows.
However, the decision for each word was not so straightforward. Murray
himself proposed a model to classify the English lexicon (see Figure 1.1),
in which he assigned literary, common, and colloquial words as the prin-
cipal source of the English lexicon, and scientific, technical, dialectal,
slang, and ‘foreign’ words as peripheral.
This view, however, is somewhat problematic given that the majority of
common words in the modern English lexicon are of foreign coinage.
English is renowned for absorbing words from other languages, and would
be hard to imagine as a complete language without these words of ‘others’
(Durkin 2014). Even words we have come to associate with quintessential
6 Birth of translingual words
Threats or assets
Fling our door wide! All, all, not one, but all, must enter.
(Frederick Furnivall 1862, Editor of the OED from 1861–1879)
Notes
1 Many cultural vocabularies show great difference in terms of UK and US
English. People assume that only spelling and pronunciation are different in the
two countries, but migrants between the two countries discover that in fact their
cultural vocabularies tend to differ greatly as well (Algeo 2009).
2 I am grateful to all the participants of the seminar, in particular those from
different language backgrounds.
3 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/metoo-shockwave/.
4 The census can be accessed online at www.ons.gov.uk.
5 Twenty-eight Japanese speakers aged 20–30 participated in the survey. It was a
sample survey. The result, however, is backed up by large-scale survey con-
ducted by National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL)
which we will look at in Chapters 8 and 9.
6 I conducted a sample questionnaire study in these languages. The number of
participants varied but at least 30–40 people participated in the survey per
language.
2 Hybrid words
Anomalies?
In this book I define hybrid words as the words which are composed of
words with different origins. These words are more easily accessible by
locals, probably because they contain native, familiar elements as well as
foreign elements. In Korean and Japanese, these kinds of English words
are more common than words with English components only. In the fol-
lowing, I will show that hybrid words are extremely common, but, espe-
cially when used in English contexts, that they are still faced with
prejudice as ‘impure’ or ‘incorrect’ words. Perhaps this can be traced to
misunderstandings of Kachru’s circles as a hierarchy of the English lan-
guage. I will show how, in fact, hybrid words are an indispensable part of
a multilingual society and may even be the greatest asset of our future
lexicon.
Expanding circle:
Outer circle:
China
Bangladesh
Egypt
Ghana
Inner circle: Indonesia
India
Australia Israel
Kenya
Canada Japan
Malaysia
New Zealand Korea
Nigeria
UK Nepal
Pakistan
USA Saudi Arabia
Philippines
Taiwan
Singapore
USSR
Sri Lanka
Zimbabwe
Whose English?
The number of English speakers in the world has been in continuous
growth for many years, and that growth is set to continue into the future as
well. Even so, the primary makeup of the English-speaking population
may be changing drastically. This is because, although the number of
English speakers is increasing, the proportion of speakers for whom
English is their first language is actually decreasing. In the mid-twentieth
century, nearly 9 per cent of the world’s population grew up speaking
English as their first language. By 2050, however, that number is expected
to decrease to about 5 per cent. The mechanism behind the increase in
numbers of the English speakers is not simple population growth of people
who speak English as their first language but rather the explosion of
English as a second language. The number of people who learn English as
a second language is huge and ever growing. Graddol (2006) remarks that
‘Population growth amongst speakers of languages other than English’
has been growing, and many of those are learning English as a second lan-
guage. The British Council in 2013 estimated that English was spoken ‘at
a useful level’ by 1.75 billion people worldwide, and that two billion
people would be using or learning English by 2020.3
As more and more people learn English as a second language, the exist-
ence of so many diverse English-speaking communities will continue to
challenge the idea of who owns the English language. Just as divergence fol-
lowing population movements has resulted in differences between the Eng-
lishes of native speaking groups such as British and American speakers, so
too should we expect differences between the Englishes of communities for
whom English is a second language. It is difficult to predict the effect that
technology will have, as interaction between speakers of different varieties
20 Birth of translingual words
of English is easier and more frequent than ever. Crystal (2000) recognises
the possibility of an ‘International Standard English’ developing which is
‘not recognisably British, American, or anything else’ for communication
between communities, which speakers will have at their disposal in addition
to a ‘variety of Standard English’ which they learn in school.
Even in countries where English is traditionally seen as the main spoken
language, such as the UK and the US, more diversity is becoming common.
In the US, the 2016 American Community Survey revealed that native
speakers of languages other than English make up about 20 per cent of the
population. In the UK, other languages are also common; as early as the
1970s, the Inner London Education Authority found that over 100 languages
were being spoken at the homes of children attending school in the city.
Such children in both the UK and the US may speak English at school, but
they speak foreign languages in the home. Many of today’s assumptions
about language, which emerged in the modern era with monolingual speak-
ers grouped into distinct communities by the borders of nation states are
likely to be challenged by ‘a new world order in languages’ that Graddol
(2006) predicts will accompany the next stage of global development.4
The growing number of bilingual speakers and speakers of English as a
second language inevitably leads to questions about what it means to be an
English speaker in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Jenkins (2007) notes
that speakers of English as a second language are often able to com-
municate better in English with other speakers of English as a second lan-
guage than with ‘native’ English speakers, and in that context, she
questions the primacy of any single variant of English and the place of
native speakers. Further, whilst English is being established as a lingua
franca, this doesn’t mean the world languages gradually become unified
into English. English as a lingua franca (ELF ) sits alongside, rather than
replaces, the local languages. Large-scale globalisation has contributed to
an increase in multilingualism and the increased visibility of more lan-
guages. One result of the wider use of ELF is the more frequent adoption
of translingual words as multilingual speakers from different cultural
backgrounds incorporate words from other languages into English. The
more frequent interactions between speech communities allowed by
modern communications technologies also means that these translingual
words spread readily from one group to another.
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