Language contact in Japan: A sociolinguistic history By Leo J. Loveday (review)

REVIEWS395 functions of individual suffixes. The book contains only a few formal errors, but future editions should streamline the abbreviations in the text3 and include a list oftables and of all abbreviations. These few minor reservations aside, this study is a must for all those interested in the history of English, contact-induced morphological change, historical word-formation and corpus-based research on affixation. REFERENCES Baayen, Harald. 1992 Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. Yearbook ofMorphology 1991, ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie, 109-49. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ------, and Antoinette Renouf. 1996. Chronicling the Times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72.69-96. Bailey, Charles-James N., and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. Pidgins —creóles—languages in contact, ed. by Jürgen Meisel, 21-53. Tübingen: Narr. Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann. 1993. Frenglish? Sur la productivité de la morphologie française dans le moyen anglais. Travaux de linguistique et de philologie 31.183-93. Górlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English—a creóle? Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries : In honor of Jacek Fisiak, ed. by Dieter Kastovsky and Alexandr Szwedek, 329-44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kurath, Hans, and Sherman M. Kuhn (eds.) 1954—. Middle English dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types ofpresent-day English word-formation. 2nd edn. München: Beck. Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik Phihpps-Universitàt Marburg Wilhelm-Ropke-Str. 6 D D-35032 Marburg Germany [plag@mailer.uni-marburg.de] Language contact in Japan: A sociolinguistic history. By Leo J. Loveday (Oxford studies in language contact.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 238. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Someone with little knowledge of Japan or Japanese might be in for a very interesting surprise upon their first visit. Like the cherry blossoms in spring, the English language is everywhere in the country. However, instead of fading away with the first winds of summer, Japanese-style English is perennial. Whether you view English as an ever-present linguistic weed that should be uprooted or a beautiful flower that should be cultivated, you cannot ignore this elementary fact: Even the most rudimentary conversations cannot be conducted in Japanese these days without the use of at least a few English loanwords or trendy catch-phrases. Another thing our surprised visitor might notice is that on second glance the 'English' in Japan often bears little resemblance to fJiat back home. Meanings of old familiar words may be changed 3 For example, the following abbreviations are opaque or not used consistently: 'NTEST' (128), 'stem/sim' (138 table 7.6), ?? language' (141), past participles are sometimes encoded as 'PP', sometimes as 'PastPart' (96, 94, respectively). The Middle English dictionary is consistently abbreviated as 'MED', but is listed in the reference section only under the name of its chief editor, Hans Kurath (incidentally, with a wrong year of publication, 1956—). 396LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) (cunning becoming 'cheater', for instance), and new forms get coined (for example, nice middle meaning a sexy and attractive middle aged man). I would suggest that a majority of the terms in the common Japanese-loanword dictionaries (e.g. Kamiya 1994, Webb 1990, Miura 1985) would not be transparent to most native English speakers. It is this pervasive use of English (and a few other languages) that is the topic of Loveday's ambitious and interesting new work. The first half of L's book examines in great detail how various languages have met Japanese, both as friend and foe. He begins his study by describing the earliest language contact situation in Japan, that with Chinese starting about 1400 years ago. Not only was a complex—and in many ways, unsuitable—writing system adopted by the Japanese, but also an extensive Chinese vocabulary and literary style. The legacy of this, of course, is three of the four orthographies in common use in Japanese today (Sino-Japanese characters and two syllabaries). European languages—and the roman alphabet—first came to Japan in the sixteenth century via Spanish...