“Gairaigo within Japanese Language:language suicide or casual culture?”

This study stems from didactic module conducted in the fall semester of the academic year 2012-2013 in the course of Japanese Philology in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna University, Italy. It aims at introducing to Japanese scholars’ differing positions about the issue of loanwords within Japanese language from a historical and sociolinguistic perspective. Successively, contemporary issues concerning garaigo will be analysed from the following perspectives: 1. Can gairaigo be considered as an example of ‘language suicide’ and as an outcome of the English language imperialism?; 2. Can gairaigo be considered as the expression of a ‘casual bilingualism’ that enriches the Japanese lexical panorama and augments mutual intelligibility among intercultural speakers?; 3. Are gairaigo useful to the lexical enrichment of Japanese language if analysed in a mere Japanese communication context? The above issues will be analysed in order to understand the actual position and further developments of katakanago within Japanese language.