BCCWJ 기반 일본어 외래어 사용경향 분석

Abstract

The present paper aims to capture the tendencies in which the native speakers of Japanese use ‘loanwords’. Based on the BCCWJ, a large-scale balanced corpus, I analyse the usage of loanwords in terms of frequency, ratio, and register. Out of 21,622 loanwords, the most frequently used loanword is 「paasento(パーセント)」(63,392), followed by 「peeji(ページ)」(24,642) and 「sentaa(センター)」(20,664). This frequency-based analysis shows that whilst the number of loanwords which are used more than 10,000 times is only 15 and the number of loanwords which are used more than 5,000 times is only 62, there are much more cases of loanwords whose frequencies range from 1 to 99. According to the criterion of frequency, the registers in which loanwords appear the most frequently are ‘published books’ and ‘library books’, whereas those in which loanwords appear the least frequently are ‘essays’ and ‘law-related books’. It is, however, possible that the registers with the high number of words contain many loanwords, in the first place. Thus, I calculated the ratio of loanwords in the total number of words in a given register and found that the highest rate was 14.3 percent in ‘Chiebukuro’, followed by 13.9 percent in ‘magazines’ and 12.5 percent in ‘blogs’. In these three registers, we find relatively few regulations on the usage of linguistic expressions, and the users seem to employ various types of expressions.