Relevant Dutch Lexical Influence in Contemporary Modern Japanese

Abstract: During the Edo Period of Japanese history, many loanwords entered the Japanese language through communication with the Dutch. Now, 164 years after the last significant linguistic exchange took place between the Dutch and the Japanese, it is interesting to see what lexical influence still exists in contemporary modern Japanese and which loanwords have fallen out of use. Therefore, the aim of this bachelor’s thesis is to determine the relevance of Dutch lexical influence in contemporary modern Japanese. The historical nature of this specific topic makes it possible to compile a base pool of Dutch loanwords in Japanese totalling 500 entries, which is based on the results of previous research. A three-tiered quantitative analysis consisting of a dictionary cross-analysis, corpus analysis and questionnaire was then conducted on this base pool of loanwords, in order to investigate which entries are still used frequently enough to be considered relevant in contemporary modern Japanese. According to the findings of this thesis, 358 words with Dutch lexical influence exist in contemporary modern Japanese. A list of these words is included as two tables at the end of this thesis.