JAPANESE LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE IN THE USE OF ENGLISH
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55197/qjssh.v7si3.1452Keywords:
interference, Japanese, lexical, morphology, syntaxAbstract
Language is a social and cultural marker of human identity, but English proficiency in Japan remains relatively low, ranking 55th out of 100 countries worldwide. This sociolinguistic condition triggers interference in the mother tongue that infiltrating the unconscious use of foreign languages among bilingual speakers. This research, with a qualitative descriptive method, aims to identify various forms of interference and analyze the factors that cause interference in Japanese speakers when using English. The data were collected from spontaneous speeches in audio-visual data (i.e. videos on the YouTube channel). The study's findings show interference in several aspects, beginning with lexical interference involving the use of Japanese vocabulary across the categories of verbs, adjectives, nouns, and adverbs, due to the speaker's limited vocabulary. At the morphological level, the use of the affirmative suffix ~yo, the respectful suffix ~san, and aizuchi expressions such as ee, eeto, and un are still influenced by the culture and nuances of Japanese politeness. In addition, syntactic interference arises through the insertion of Japanese phrases or clauses at the beginning of speech as a representation of the speaker's thought process. In conclusion, the main driving factors behind this interference include low English-language competence, differences in cultural norms regarding politeness, and strong first-language thinking habits that carry over into the target language. Although interference risks threaten the purity of language, they are still seen as an important part of the process of future development and enrichment of the language's vocabulary.
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Copyright (c) 2026 ALIFFIA RACHMAWATI, ZAID MOHD ZIN, ROSLINA MAMAT
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