I know textbooks say that Katakana is used for borrowed words from other languages, but sometimes I also see it seemingly slotted into text that’s clearly not a borrowed noun (mostly from reading raw manga) or for names that are of Japanese origin i.e. the name of food ingredients in my local Japanese retail. Is there any particular reason for this, or is it just because the writer decided to go “f\*\*\* all” with the rules like we do with commas during texting.
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edit: this was very insightful, many thanks to everyone who replied. It’s great to know there’s a community of learners I can reach out to when questions arise.
14 comments
> name of food ingredients
They may have some kanji that not everybody is used to see, thus the author uses katakana (instead of hiragana), so that the words stick out as if they were written with kanji.
In manga, katakana can be used for emphasis, the same way we might italicize something in English.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/why-elderly-japanese-women-have-names-in-katakana
This is one of the many strange usages.
Sometimes katakana is used in a big string of kana so that it’s easier to tell the words apart, even when they’re native words. This is especially common when kanji isn’t being used very much. You see it a lot in the manga Yotsubato when Yotsuba is talking. She is a little kid so she doesn’t know any kanji and it doesn’t appear in her speech bubbles. Since her speech is just strings of kana with no spaces, without putting certain words in katakana it would be harder to read what she was saying. It’s also used for mimetic words like キラキラ or ヌルヌル.
In media, katakana will sometimes also be used to indicate that the speaker is a foreigner or a robot or something, so the reader can tell that their Japanese sounds “weird”. Katakana is also used for slang sometimes. In these cases you have to look at the context to figure out why katakana is being used.
*Usually* the rule is that you don’t mix them within a single word (though there are always exceptions. Looking at you, ドラえもん), so if you see some katakana among hiragana, you can generally be sure that it’s a separate word.
Katakana is used all the time outside of foreign words. It’s used for 1) difficult kanji that the writer doesn’t remember or doesn’t expect you to know, 2) emphasizing a word, especially in advertisements, 3) people’s names (my mother’s name is written in katakana), 4) the names of plants and animals, 5) certain onomatopoeias, etc.
These uses are not against any “rules” of Japanese. Your textbook was just oversimplifying the situation, as most introductory books do.
Japanese names are sometimes written in katakana, especially if the name is not traditional with kanji that might be hard to interpret. Actually come to think of it filling out forms online you are always asked for your name in kana. Not sure why hiragana is not used instead.
They used to be commonly used as okurigana by the military, and I believe they were also the norm for telegrams way back when.
katakana is also used like italics for emphasis, and also used to represent non-humans speaking. there’s no absolute necessity for it to be used for foreign words and nothing else. also some slang words, some onomonopoeia, and some people’s names are all written in katakana.
It seems like Japanese people use it as a different font type whenever they feel like making something look ‘cool’
Companies/ shops often seem to use katakana for their names, I often see ラメン and メガネ… On the flip side I’ve seen tomato written in hiragana とまと while lettuce would be レタス… They don’t give a shit clearly lol, it’s just stylistic choice. Also like you I’ve seen things like Samurai written in katakana in manga and was really confused サムライ???
So, textbooks that make the claim that Katakana is used for borrowed words, though not outright lying, aren’t telling you the whole truth. Katakana was, until very recently, the main kana script used in legal documents, and is used besides for transcriptions of Kanji and for onomatopoeia. But that’s a lot to take in for a beginner, so textbooks usually just say ‘it’s used for foreign words’ and leave it at that.
To add to what others have posted, katakana was originally used for annotating Buddhist scriptures to show how to pronounce the chants. It quickly grew beyond that but it retained its association with sound over meaning, foreign words, and educated prestigious writings (particularly those associated with men).
The modern division between katakana and hiragana only became the normal way to write everything after World War 2. But it retains some of the older usages — for instance, using it for sound words, emphasis, names of animals and plants (like Latin names in the west), and such.
(Some of the uses also are based on the fact that katakana are harder to confuse in rapid writing compared to hiragana, and that they are easier to display on low resolution devices — maybe this has changed now but when I was in Japan last time in 2013, there were still a lot of copy machines that used all katakana for the displays.)
I think we should stop saying “katakana is for borrowed words” already.
I like to describe katakana as an *alternative* syllabary, it’s used for:
* words of foreign origin (like we use italic)
* emphasize a word (as we do with italic or bold)
* make a name distinct in a string of kana when you don’t want to use the complicated kanji
* animals (かえる=帰る、カエル=🐸)
* onomatopoeia
* style (monogatari scenes are all in kanji/katakana)
and others
Basically, that “explanation” for what katakana is used for is not true. There are so many reasons to use katakana as a tool for expression and communication.
Onomatopoeic Sounds are written in Katakana almost always.