Loanwords in Japanese

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Loanwords in Japanese" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Gairaigo (外来語, Japanese pronunciation: [ɡaiɾaiɡo]) is Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chinese), but in modern times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese dialects, such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese. These are primarily written in the katakana phonetic script, with a few older terms written in Chinese characters (kanji); the latter are known as ateji.

Japanese has many loan words from Chinese, accounting for a sizeable fraction of the language. These words were borrowed during ancient times and are written in kanji. Modern Chinese loanwords are generally considered gairaigo and written in katakana, or sometimes written in kanji (either with the more familiar word as a base text gloss and the intended katakana as furigana or vice versa); pronunciation of modern Chinese loanwords generally differs from the corresponding usual pronunciation of the characters in Japanese.

For a list of terms, see the List of gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms.