Is Japanese in danger of being subsumed by English?


As a beginner student of Japanese I noticed that Japanese uses an incredible
amount of English vocab (pronounced the Japanese way of course).

I have studied a few other languages and English has this effect on many
languages due to it's global scope but not to the extent of Japanese.

There are social experiments on YouTube where Japanese people try to speak
Japanese without using an English loanword and they find it very hard. Some
English loanwords they didn't even know were from English.

I seen a comment from a Japanese lady who lived in the States for a few years
and when she went back to Japan she discovered that many Japanese words that
she still uses have been subsumed in a sense by the cooler English version.
She even said that a few times when speaking to young people they didn't even
understand the Japanese word and have only ever heard the English version.

Is Japanese in danger of losing to English bit by bit ?

Do you think at some point the Japanese government is going to make a movement
to encourage a return to pure Japanese and try to shake off the adopted
English vocab ?




Things like this have happened all over the world. In the past, English
speakers were so in love with cultures of other countries that they imported
countless words into the English vocabulary. Now, English is a [wonderful
mishmash of words from old English, French and
Latin](https://medium.com/@andreas_simons/the-english-language-is-a-lot-more-
french-than-we-thought-heres-why-4db2db3542b3). This is why English often has
several ways to say one thing (e.g., ask-question-interrogate, help-aid-
assist, word-term-lexeme).

  * [Latin influence in English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English)
  * [Influence of French on English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English)

For English speakers, such massive influx of foreign words happened long ago
when English was not culturally as strong as now. In addition, English doesn't
have something like katakana to explicitly mark foreign words as foreign. As a
result, you certainly cannot speak English fluently without using those non-
English-origin words, and you probably cannot even tell which easy words are
originally foreign. But that is not to say English disappeared or English was
in danger of disappearing.

Back to Japanese, it is true that [some native words are gradually
disappearing](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/16256/5010), but this is
something that happens over a period of 50 years or more. Aside from trivial
buzzwords, common native words won't be forgotten in 5 years or so. Someone
who has lived in the States for only a few years is unlikely to notice any
significant difference. I have no problem reading Japanese written 50 years
ago. In addition, loanwords from English are almost certainly written in
katakana, so Japanese people rarely forget their origin.

> Do you think at some point the Japanese government is going to make a
> movement to encourage a return to pure Japanese and try to shake off the
> adopted English vocab?

This [already happened](https://www.imabi.net/tekiseigo.htm) during WWII
(unsurprisingly). There are recent
["proposals"](https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/gairaigo/) from the government, too,
but most Japanese did not pay attention to them. See also: [Do loanwords have
a more formal/technical/"soulless" feel compared to their native
counterparts?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/40933/5010)

