Which kanji to use for 'change television channel'?


The verb for change is かえる。 Which kanji is used for changing a TV channel?
Which kanji should be used, and why? Even native Japanese websites appear
confused. Is it: 返る・変える・替える・換える？

I must be hanging around the wrong Japanese people. Even they don't seem
sure!!




I looked in a few dictionaries, but they didn't agree on which kanji to use.

So how can we answer this question? By looking at actual usage. How do we do
this? Well, you can search Google, but unfortunately, [Google result estimates
can be very
unreliable](https://japanese.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/google-
counts-may-not-be-as-reliable-as-you-imagine).

Instead, I decided to search the [**_Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written
Japanese_** (BCCWJ)](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/). I searched for the
following five strings and wrote down how many results I found for each, then
sorted the results in descending order.

Here's what I found:

[code]

      チャンネルを変え　３３件
      チャンネルをかえ　　３件
      チャンネルを換え　　２件
      チャンネルを替え　　２件
      チャンネルを代え　　０件
    
[/code]

As you can see, 変 is the most popular kanji in this case.

