Phonological Changes of English Loanwords in Japan’s Articles

This paper discusses of English loanwords in Japanese. The discussion of it aims to identify the kind of phonological changes of English loanwords which have adopted into the Japanese and analyze about the phonological changes of English loandwords in Japanese. Phonological change of English loanwords in this paper is classified by the types of sounds that change in the basic theory. The theories that underlie in this analysis are theory about phonology and phonological change according to Crowley. This research analyzing consists of three steps. First is collection data, second is analyzing data, and the last is presentation the result of analyzing data. It uses descriptive qualitative research because of it attempts to describe particular linguistic phenomena related to the object of the study. The data is taken from asahi.com’s article on Friday, 14th of February 2014 until Thursday, 20th of February 2014. There are 195 loanwords that are founded. All data is used for describing the phonological changes of English loanwords in Japanese. But for finding out the kind of phonological changes is needed to take sample. It just takes the data on Monday, 17th of February 2014. The results of the analysis from the data showed that based on phonological changes, there are three kinds of phonological changes in formation and writing English loanwords in Japanese, namely dissimilation, lenition and sound addition. There are 13 phonemes that are getting dissimilation process it is about 94,8% from data. The data that’s are getting lenition process is about 11,7% from all data. Whereas, the English loanwords in Japanese that are getting sound addition process consist to addition of vowel [u] is amounting 94,8%, addition of vowel [o] is about 25,1%, addition of vowel [i] is about 9,2%, long vowel is amounting 36,9% and addition of consonant or geminate is about 32,3%. Based on the things that happened during the research process, it can be stated that the limitation the pronunciation system of Japanese makes foreign words are absorbed is getting an adjustment the system of pronunciation. So the writing and pronunciation of English loanwords in Japanese will be much different from the original