The Impact of the British-Japanese Relations on British English: a Diachronic Sociolinguistic Study

In this work, I aimed to establish the connection between language and international relations by analysing relevant historical events and their possible influence on language. I did that using the example of British-Japanese relations and their impact on the influx of Japanese borrowings into British English and the description of Japan in British texts. The borrowings I mainly collected from the Oxford English Dictionary and Cannon (1996) are studied here regarding their orthography, phonetics, semantics, and morphology. The analysis of the descriptions takes from the concept of the linguistic worldview and is approached from a discourse analysis perspective. The whole analysis is contextualised within the historical events that took place between 1600 and 2020 and are important to British-Japanese relations. This work consists of three chapters. The first one serves the purpose of the theoretical introduction, where I explain the most essential terms, including borrowing, language contact, and linguistic worldview. I also discuss the methodology I applied in later analyses and justify the established periods. The second chapter includes ten analyses where the analysed lexemes are sorted according to the year of their first use, and the analysed texts are sorted according to their year of publication, from the earliest to the latest in the studied period. Each analysis starts with some remarks on the source texts, which are followed by a description of the historical background, an analysis of the discursive linguistic worldview, an analysis of the borrowings, and a summary. The analyses differ due to the available source materials and information. For instance, due to the lack of relevant information, the first analyses do not detail the pronunciation of the lexemes, which leaves some space for additional etymological considerations. The third chapter presents the conclusions, which are sorted into three sections. The first section focuses on the results of the linguistic worldview analyses. The second section presents the conclusions related to the borrowings, their different linguistic aspects, and the factors which may have influenced their influx into British English. The last section of the third chapter answers the research questions asked in the first chapter and lists further implications of the study. The analysis I performed allowed me to establish the relationship between the history of Japanese borrowings in British English and the history of British-Japanese relations. The results show that borrowings can be a source of historical information, especially if we consider the changing meaning and dictionary definitions and the years of first use. It was also revealed that the character of the relations is not only reflected in the discourse but also in the influx of borrowing. However, it is shown that war does not particularly inhibit the flow of the borrowings into the language, yet it most likely influences the semantic category or discipline of the borrowed lexemes.