Let’s make them shorter! : abbreviated loanwords in Japanese

Abstract: The focus of this thesis is to show the variety of Japanese loanwords’ abbreviation processes. Nowadays loanwords play a big role in Japan’s society. Most of loanwords are long and have some difficulty to integrate in Japanese language in their full forms. This is why most of the loanwords are shortened by the usage of various patterns and rules, which will be described and analyzed in this paper. However, the aim of this thesis is to find whether Japanese native speakers can abbreviate new borrowings (words that do not exist as Japanese loanwords) correctly by satisfying all rules and whether they are able to compound given loanwords in one. This thesis also will identify which pattern is being used the most by analyzing answers of Japanese speakers.