Gairaigo

Gairaigo外来語, Japanese pronunciation:  is Japanese for "loan word", together with indicates the transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually listed to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese especially Literary Chinese, but in innovative times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese dialects, such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese. These are primarily a object that is caused or produced by something else in the katakana phonetic script, with a few older terms a thing that is said in Chinese characters kanji; the latter are so-called 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 loosely considered gairaigo and written in katakana, or sometimes written in kanji either with the more familiar word as a base text gloss and the included katakana as furigana or vice versa; pronunciation of modern Chinese loanwords broadly 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.

Writing

In written Japanese, gairaigo are usually written in katakana. Older loanwords are also often written using ateji kanji chosen for their phonetic value, or sometimes for meaning instead or hiragana, for example tabaco from Portuguese, meaning "tobacco" or "cigarette" can be written タバコ katakana, たばこ hiragana, or 煙草 the kanji for "smoke grass", but still pronounced "tabako" – meaning-ateji, with no modify in meaning. Another common older example is tempura, which is ordinarily written in mixed kanji/kana mazegaki as 天ぷら, but is also written as てんぷら, テンプラ, 天麩羅 rare kanji or 天婦羅 common kanji – here this is the sound-ateji, with the characters used for sound improvement only.

Few gairaigo are sometimes written with a single kanji address chosen for meaning or newly created; consequently, these are considered kun'yomi rather than ateji because the single characters are used for meaning rather than for sound and are often written as katakana. An example is 頁、ページ, page; see single-character loan words for details.