Japanese: A Heavily Culture-Laden Language

By Fengping Gao. 2005

Language and culture are interdependent. The uniqueness of the Japanese society makes Japanese language a heavily culture-laden one, which contributes much to the language barrier between Japanese and Americans. It is compulsory that many cultural concepts must be integrated into comparative studies so they can be better understood from a cross-cultural perspective, and communication between Japanese and Americans must always be carried out with culture awareness.Key Words: uniqueness; language; culture; communication

Subfields: Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Linguistics

1. Verena Rieser
2. Diyi Yang
3. Dirk Hovy
4. Y-Lan Boureau

Citations in the corpus

• Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling (2021, background): “For example, Japanese requires the consideration of the social hierarchy and relations when expressing politeness (Gao, 2005), whereas English can achieve the same effect by adding individual words like “please”.”
• Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design (2022, background): “expressing politeness (Gao, 2005), whereas English can achieve the same effect by adding individual words like “please.”
• Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP (2022, background): “For example, the level of politeness and thus also how offensive something is perceived depends very much on communicative norms (Gao, 2005; Larina, 2015).”
• The Importance of Modeling Social Factors of Language: Theory and Practice (2021, background): “For example, in Japanese (Gao, 2005), the expression of hierarchy necessitates more fine-grained politeness and formality levels than in Western cultures.”