Abstract—As an attempt to conflate the existing pedagogical
concept of "Standard English" and the emerging theoretical
notion of "standard non-native varieties of English", this study
looks at the stability of the claimed "characteristic" forms of
"Japanese English" and shows the statistical likelihood of their
occurrence in particular syntactic and semantic environments.
This approach is both pedagogically and theoretically
interesting inasmuch as it identifies the divergent forms. The
classroom teacher, for example, may know what to “correct”
and the textbook writers what to highlight. The theoretical
linguist who argues for the existence of non-native standard
varieties of English has also got ready evidence on which to
draw; evidence that can also validate the concept of
“fossilization”, which seeks to account for the adult non-native
speaker‟s grammatical variability. My starting point was to
compile a corpus of the “educated written English” in Japan.
The corpus consists of material that appears in the four
Japanese national English-language newspapers, Asahi Evening
News, Japan Times, Mainichi Daily News, and The Daily
Yomiuri which comprises the editorials, articles,
advertisements, letters to the editor, etc.; government
publications, such as those of the Japanese Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT);
articles published in English by Japanese University professors
and the writing of university students in Japan. Statistical
information is given in the text itself. Because we are interested
in the language produced by a people or group of speakers
rather than the individual variability within the group, the
data-base is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. We are
concerned here with agreement in number between the head of
the NP, which is typically a noun, and other elements such as
determiners, quantifiers, verbs and numerals. Our data
indicates a high percentage of conflicts between the principles
underlying concord in the English written by educated
Japanese. In numerous examples, there seems to be a conflict
between grammatical concord and attraction through
proximity. The principle of attraction through proximity here,
however, does not seem to be reinforced by notional concord,
and that is why these examples may seem divergent. On that
basis, we can reasonably conclude that divergence in concord in
educated written English in Japan largely reflects the conflict
between grammatical concord and concord of proximity, which
is not uncommon in this area of standard practice. However, the
data seems to also suggest that either there exists something
called „English usage in Japan‟ or that there exists something
called „Japanese English‟.
Index Terms—Concord, descriptive grammar, Japanese
English, new Englishes.
K. W. Olagboyea is with Tsuru University, Department of English,
Faculty of Letters and Graduate School, Yamanashi, Japan 402-8555 (e-mail:
kola@ tsuru.ac.jp).
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Cite:Kolawole Waziri Olagboyega, "“Japanese English”: A Descriptive Grammar of Concord in the English Written by Educated Japanese," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 25-36, 2019.