The Research Of Japanese Loanwords Based On The Perspective Of Memetics

Language is the most important tool for people to communicate with each other. Linguistic meaning of words, especially the loanwords, is the most obvious part of what culture influence language.Loanwords, the production of direct or indirect communication between different nations, can fuse all kinds of language and culture into a harmonious whole as its language and cultural duality. And Japanese loanword takes a special and important role among the Chinese loanwords.A large number of Japanese words were introduced into China and borrowed by Chinese from the late 19th and early 20th century. After the reform and opening up, communication of politics, economy, culture and education gradually increased between Japan and China. At the same time, some Japanese loanwords were integrated into Chinese and penetrated into every field of Chinese national social lives. And it is inevitable that Japanese loanwords must have an impact on Chinese words.Language memetics, a new theory of pragmatics, affect a lot in many aspects of revealing the language development rule. And it’s much more explanatory when people come to the problems like word copies between different languages during the introduction and development of loanwords.This new theory, using Darwin’s evolution theory to explain the development of culture, provides a brand new perspective and idea for the research of Japanese loanwords.Analyzing Japanese loanwords under the direction of Language memetics, it can be found that the formation of loanword meme will go through choosing, copy, spread, variation and some other steps. During the choosing step, loanword meme is influenced by the demand of social development, vocabulary system, social culture, users cognition, emotion and psychology.During the copy and spread steps, some loanword memes are recognized by users and spread abroad to become dominant memes and strengthen their status in Chinese vocabulary system. While some loanword memes disappear as they are unidiomatic and lose chance to be copied to spread and turn to be weak memes.From this point, loanword meme can be regarded as microcosm of culture and the relationship between language and culture.