Liquid Grammar, Liquid Style

On the East-Asian Way of Using English or Reflections on the "Linguistic Air-Guitar"
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein


1. At Full Love With Vivian
The Western visitor of East Asia marvels at English expressions that he encounters in advertisements, in magazines, on T-Shirts, and elsewhere that seem to come "out of another world." Single words and short adjective-loaded English sentences, rarely longer than five words, suggest something like the invention of a new language. In Japan and in Korea this phenomenon has been thriving for decades; in China it is more recent but developing along the same lines.

The use of English in East Asia is linked to a certain part of East-Asian social history. "Japano-English" for example, is neither "real" English nor Japanese but symbolizes, within the domain of linguistics, the co-existence of two cultural spheres. In Japan, after the mid-1880s, an earlier uncritical and unsystematic acceptance of things Western gradually gave way to the view that Japanese and Western culture can exist side-by-side. From then on the question was: how can East Asia incorporate the West without being culturally overwhelmed by it?