By Damian Flanagan My eldest daughter has a fondness for learning languages -- French and German -- but her real passion is for what we would call ...

Foreign words undergo transformation in various ways when they enter another language. The following are some of the technical terms that linguists use to describe such changes. All languages have ...

Famously one of life’s only two certainties, “tax” has been chosen by the Japanese public as its word of the year, reflecting rising costs of living and much-discussed tax reforms in the world’s third ...

In that most dingy of Japanese official buildings called the Gaimusho, a flimsy affair of wood and beaverboard, whose shabbiness is accentuated by the grandiose Navy Office across the way, Japan’s new ...

It’s the language that gave us the world’s first novel, birthed commonplace words from tycoon to emoji and produced three winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Why, then, is the Japanese Word of ...

Words like futon, tycoon and karaoke are so ingrained in the English language that it's easy to forget they are actually of Japanese origin. In fact, Japan has long been a rich source of loan words ...